Grad rates likely slightly better than terrible

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.