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April 9, 2008

Pomp, Circumstance, and Fudging Numbers

Try and make sense of these two sets of facts:

Fact set 1: The state of Missouri reported an 85.8 percent high school graduation rate for the 2006-2007 school year. In the same year, New Mexico reported a high school graduation rate of almost 90 percent to the US Department of Education. Multiple states provide similarly high rates in their official reports to the federal government.

Fact set 2: At the middle school where I teach in St. Louis city, no fewer than ten eighth graders have dropped out of school or have been expelled without any intention or re-enrolling elsewhere. This means that our junior high school graduation rate is just over 90 percent.

How can these two sets of facts co-exist? To be sure, part of it owes to the nature of the St. Louis City school district, which has lower school completion rates than Missouri as a whole. But the main source of the dissonance is something altogether different, and worse: most states are simply lying when they disclose their high school graduation rates.

There is little surprise as to why the states are so willing to lie about their graduation rates -- it's just good public relations. Admitting that thousands upon thousands of students are quitting school early does not win points with current residents, potential residents, and certainly not voters. The more perplexing issue is why we (the public, the federal government, America as a whole) have not made a fuss about it.

It might be helpful to start with an explanation for how states are able to under-report high school dropouts so dramatically. The trick lies in how a state defines the dropout rate. New Mexico, for instance, defines its high school dropout rate as the percentage of enrolled twelth graders who do not receive a diploma in a given year. That is a little bit like saying America's armed forces has had a zero percent casualty rate in Iraq based on the number of deaths & injuries we've sustained in the past twenty four hours. As anyone who's been in school before can testify, youth start dropping out of the education pipeline as early as seventh grade (I've seen it first-hand) -- these dropouts should count against state graduation rates everybit as much as twelfth grade dropouts.

Some states have started to fix these obvious errors. North Carolina reported a 95 percent graduation rate in 2006, but changed its formula last year such that a more accurate rate of 68 percent was published in 2007. But Missouri, New Mexico, and other states are still fudging the numbers and misleading the public about the success (and failure) of their schools.

All of this is why Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's announcement that she will be creating a new federally mandated high school dropout rate formula was so encouraging last week. Education shares at least some similarities with the business world (though the comparisons are not completely parallel -- a debate for a different blog entry), and perhaps the most important one is the need for rigorous, high quality data collection to drive outcomes. Maybe this will get the ball rolling on the high school graduation issue... and ensure that the 10 students who Missouri (read: the adults in my school) has failed in my middle school are acknowledged and not simply forgotten.

• Posted by Aaron Tang at 7:00PM on 04/ 9/08
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