Rules to pinpoint graduation rates

SEATTLE – Comparing graduation rates from one state to the next or even one school to another can be as difficult as trying to help your children with their math homework: Everyone has their own way of coming up with an answer.

That challenge is expected to go away within the next five years, but not without more pain, aggravation and money.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced in April proposed rules that would require states to assign each student a unique ID number to facilitate tracking from the time a student enters 9th grade until he or she graduates or drops out of school.

Spellings’ call – which mirrors an agreement from the National Governors Association – will force every district to face up to the reality of a more scientific graduation rate, and quit hiding behind more positive estimates.

Washington state assigned a unique ID to every student four years ago, so this year’s senior class will be the first with four years of data, and the 2008 graduation rate will be based on the method Spellings wants to mandate for all states.

State officials don’t know if the new method will help or hurt Washington’s steady 70 percent on-time graduation rate, said Joe Willhoft, director of assessment for the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

But, Willhoft adds, the point of the effort is to come up with a number that tells the truth.

One of the facts covered up by graduation rate estimates is that only about one half of minorities graduate from high school, and those without a diploma face a bleak future. No Child Left Behind was supposed to focus on the inequalities in the nation’s public schools, but has done little to improve graduation rates.

The federal government has offered grants to improve state education departments’ data systems, which may be used to pay for a system to track students by unique IDs, said U.S. Education Department spokesman Chad Colby.

Under No Child Left Behind, states may use their own methods of calculating graduation rates and set their own goals for improving them. Spellings’ proposal would tighten up what many feel is one of the biggest loopholes in the federal law.

According to the Data Quality Campaign, a national organization working to encourage state policymakers to collect and share high quality education data, only a handful of states have yet to begin making the switch to a more accountable graduation rate system.

In 2005 all 50 states signed the National Governors Association’s “graduation rate compact,” pledging to adopt accurate and consistent graduation measurement.

Idaho will likely be one of the last states to make good on that promise. Lawmakers in Idaho just approved the dollars to pay for the new system, which will take up to four years to put into place, said Melissa McGrath, spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Education.

Until then, Idaho will continue to base graduation rates on a formula that focuses on dropout statistics, which McGrath says is “as accurate as it can be.”

This is one of the most commonly used formulas for estimating graduation rates, but it does not account for transfers and may be skewed because some schools automatically count kids as transfers if they don’t come in and announce their intentions to drop out.

Spellings’ proposal mandates calculating graduation rates by following each ninth-grader for four years in every state by the 2013-14 school year.

“Her approach allows one year to prepare and four years to implement, which is a reasonable approach,” said Willhoft of Washington state.

The proposed regulations recognize extended graduation rates for students in special education, but not for English language learners or anyone else.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals would like to see the new rules change the goal to graduation within five years, give equal weight to a General Education Diploma or GED, and allow special-needs students until age 21 to graduate on time.