U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula SAM DILLON New York Times April 1, 2008

Inaccurate Data Moving to sweep away the tangle of inaccurate state data that has obscured the severity of the nation’s high school dropout crisis, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will require all states to use one federal formula to calculate graduation and dropout rates, Bush administration officials said on Monday.Margaret Spellings

Official Statistics The requirement would be one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary, experts said, because it would affect the official statistics issued by all 50 states and each of the nation’s 14,000 public high schools. Ms. Spellings will announce her action at a so-called dropout prevention summit in Washington on Tuesday, the officials said. The summit is organized by a group beginning a national campaign intended to reduce dropout rates.Washington “In the coming weeks, I will take administrative steps to ensure that all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time — and how many drop out,” Ms. Spellings said in remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday and made available to The New York Times.

Other Formulas On Tuesday, Ms. Spellings is not expected to outline the specific graduation rate formula that she intends to require states to adopt. But in her remarks, she noted that all 50 governors in the National Governors Association signed a compact in 2005 agreeing to eventually calculate their graduation rates according to a common method.National Governors Association Under that formula, graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth graders that entered four years earlier. The governors’ agreement lacks the force of law, and a few states have moved to enact the governors’ formula more vigorously than others. Many states still use dozens of other graduation rate formulas that vary in reliability. New Mexico, for example, has defined its graduation rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who receive a diploma, a method that grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave school before 12th grade. North Carolina until last year used another formula that so exaggerated graduates that when the state adopted a more accurate method last year, its rate plummeted to 68 from 95 percent.

What Are We Measuring Are we following schools … or students? Assume all dropouts don’t come back. Assume 80% of transfers, graduate. Button