Amid sexting scandals and tanking test scores, it turns out teenagers may not be doing quite as badly as we thought on one very important measure: graduation rate.
Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute, including Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, issued a scathing statement Thursday calling Education Week magazine’s recent analysis of graduation rates “exceedingly inaccurate.” The magazine’s methods understate graduation rate by 9 percentage points overall, and about 14 points for minority students.
That means that the nation’s top two districts in terms of graduation rate – the Washington area’s own Montgomery and Fairfax counties – likely exceed the 83 percent rate attributed to them by Education Week.
The magazine’s methods found that about 69 percent of American students overall graduated in 2007, the most recent year for which national data is available.
