Report Reignites Rate Debate: A Nonprofit Group Found Fewer High Schoolers Graduate Than the State Has Reported.

By David Harrison, The Roanoke Times, Va.

Jun. 13–A report released Tuesday finds a lower high school graduation rate for Virginia than the one provided by the Virginia Department of Education.

The nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes the trade journal Education Week, calculated the 2004 graduation rate for states and school districts nationwide according to a formula developed by one of the report’s writers.

Under EPE’s formula, 73.1 percent of Virginia’s prospective seniors received a standard or advanced high school diploma in 2004, the last year for which figures were available. That figure is almost 7 percentage points lower than the graduation rate of 80 percent reported by the state.

In Roanoke, the report found a graduation rate of 51.2 percent in 2004. The state, by contrast, found a graduation rate of 58 percent.

The EPE report, which comes in the middle of high school graduation season, reignites a long-standing debate surrounding the proper way to calculate graduation rates.

Christopher Swanson, EPE’s research director who developed the formula used in the report, said states use a variety of ways to calculate their graduation rates, making it impossible to compare them.

But Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education said that EPE’s formula has its own problems, notably that it doesn’t account for transferring students and students who repeat a grade.

Starting with the class of 2008, Pyle said, state education officials will roll out a new method of calculating graduation rates, one that he said will offer a more accurate snapshot of the state’s high school graduates.

For now, Virginia is among 32 states that use a method that relies heavily on counting students who drop out. But tracking dropouts is the responsibility of local school officials, who may not always have effective data-keeping mechanisms, Swanson said.

As a result, the number of dropouts could be underreported, skewing the figures reported by the state, he said.

“It’s very difficult to track down what happened to those students,” who don’t stay at the same school throughout their high school career, he said. “Are they transfer students? Are they a dropout? Are they somewhere else and you’re no longer picking them up?”

The formula developed by Swanson and used in the report calculates the ratio of students who get promoted through high school and earn diplomas. The report applies the formula in all states and in all school districts, making it possible to compare graduation rates across states.

It finds that Virginia’s graduation rate of 73.1 percent is about 3 percentage points higher than the national average.

The report also finds a gap between the graduation rates of black and white students in Virginia. In 2004, the rate for white students was 78.2 percent while that for their black peers was 61 percent. The gap between black and white students nationally is even wider.

One of the most eyebrow-raising discrepancies was in Norfolk, where the state reported a 73 percent graduation rate as opposed to a rate of 39 percent in the EPE report.

In some cases, however, the report calculated a higher graduation rate than the state Department of Education. Roanoke County, for instance, had an 88 percent graduation rate in 2004 under the state’s formula and a 90.5 percent rate under EPE’s formula.

But EPE’s formula has no way of including the thousands of students who repeat ninth grade nationwide, a phenomenon knows as the “ninth-grade bulge,” Pyle said. These students may not graduate in four years but may be on track to graduate within five.

In Virginia, roughly 12,000 students a year repeat ninth grade, Pyle said, a little more than 10 percent of all ninth-graders.

Pyle also took issue with rules set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act that only consider students who receive a standard or advanced diploma as a graduate. Virginia offers five types of diplomas, one designed for students with disabilities. But only the standard or advanced diplomas count “which ignores the achievements of students with disabilities,” Pyle said.

“And to ignore the achievements of these students is not fair to the students or the schools,” he added.

Virginia has been keeping track of entering high school students since 2005, which will allow the state to calculate a more accurate graduation rate for the class of 2008, Pyle said.

This new method, developed in 2005 for the National Governors’ Association, is “pretty accurate,” Swanson said, so long as local districts keep proper records.

However, he warned, the NGA’s formula has caused graduation rates to drop in states that have adopted it, such as Indiana.

“It’s going to take a big hit in terms of the numbers,” he said. “I think states really deserve credit when they’re doing that, because politically it’s a very difficult thing to do.”

On the Net: www.edweek.org

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