U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula

By SAM DILLON | NY Times
Published: April 1, 2008

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.

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.

“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.

Ms. Spellings’s statements underline the rising urgency among policymakers and corporate leaders to address the nation’s dropout epidemic, as well as the administration’s growing sense that efforts in Congress to rewrite the law this year may not succeed.

The adoption of a federal graduation formula would correct one of the most glaring weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Although the law requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, it allows states to set their own formulas for calculating them. As a result, most states have used formulas that understate the number of dropouts, and official graduation rates are not comparable from state to state. The No Child law establishes no national school completion goal.

Michael Cohen, who was an assistant secretary of education under President Clinton, said the proposed measure would be considerably more important than most Department of Education regulations.

“This is a huge deal, in terms of its impact, because it will basically affect every high school in the country,” Mr. Cohen said.

Senior Education Department officials said Ms. Spellings would publish the proposed graduation formula requirement in the Federal Register, opening a period of public comment that often lasts several months, before issuing the final regulation later this year.

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.

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.

New York has reported a 77 percent graduation rate to comply with the No Child law. But the federal department uses a formula that closely approximates the governors’ formula to estimate a graduation rate for all 50 states, and using that method, New York’s graduation rate is 65 percent.

The dropout summit scheduled for Tuesday has been organized by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his wife, Alma, who is the chairwoman of the America’s Promise Alliance, the group beginning the national campaign.

“We Americans can’t afford to have a third or more of our kids not getting through high school — how can we have this?” Mr. Powell said in an interview. “Some places have a 70 percent dropout rate. We can’t have this.”

According to a report issued by the alliance for Tuesday’s summit, 1.2 million American teenagers drop out of high school every year. Christopher B. Swanson, the report’s author, said that to use the governors’ graduation formula, a state must have a statewide school record system capable of tracking each student through four years of high school.

Many states have made progress toward building such systems, Dr. Swanson said, but some have not, raising questions about how the Department of Education could require states to calculate a rate that is beyond their technological capacity, he said. The department might have to establish an interim graduation rate formula for use by some states until they can develop their tracking systems, and that could mean that graduation rates might for a time still not be comparable across states, he said.

Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, a group that has pushed for more accurate reporting of graduation rates, said Ms. Spellings’s action “shows that she is impatient for changes in N.C.L.B. that she knows are commonsensical.”

“Reauthorization is taking longer than she wants to wait,” Ms. Wilkins said. “She’s tired of seeing flaws in the law limit its effectiveness. She has the power to make changes, and so she is.”