Bush administration officials in the U.S. Department of Education want to require all 14,000 high schools in the nation to calculate dropout and graduation rates the same way. The proposed regulatory change announced in early April by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is among the department’s most significant and far-reaching reforms because it will force public school officials in all 50 states to stop hiding the poor performance of their schools under layers of misleading and indecipherable statistics about who is in class and who is graduating.
True graduation rates have been suppressed for years by school administrators who collect fat salaries and retirement packages while they protect unionized teachers from genuine accountability and transparency. Even now, thousands of ill-prepared youngsters in the District, Maryland and Virginia have virtually no chance of graduating with a high school diploma. Many are deliberately retained as “permanent freshmen” so they count for funding purposes but don’t skew the results of standardized tests taken in the upper grades.
When asked why so many students “disappear” between ninth and 12th grades, the standard reply of public education administrators is a vague “They must have moved.” Hogwash. Schools know exactly how many times they transfer academic records. If there’s no transcript request, there’s a good chance the student has dropped out. But it’s much easier to manipulate statistics than correct a monopolistic system that fails every year to graduate on average nearly one of every three students who enter high school. It’s even worse in America’s 50 largest cities where up to half of all students fail to graduate.
Even in the affluent suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C., true graduation rates are shockingly low for school systems that are consistently touted as the best in the nation and typically consume half of all local taxes in addition to massive state and federal subsidies. Using 2003 – 2004 figures, the Arlington-based Education Research Center applied methodology similar to that proposed by Spellings to compute the actual percentage of students who earned a high school diploma. Fairfax and Montgomery counties both managed to graduate just 80 percent of their incoming freshmen four years later. Graduation rates for Arlington (73 percent), Prince William (69 percent), Prince George’s (67 percent) and D.C. (58 percent) were even lower.
These local dropouts will join the 1.2 million young Americans who enter adulthood each year lacking the minimum academic skills they need to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy. Over the next two years, America’s Promise Alliance — the nation’s largest anti-dropout coalition of business, faith organizations, civic groups and educators — will host summits in all 50 states to educate the public and encourage support for effective action to stem the dropout tide. Forcing schools to admit just how bad the problem has become is an essential first step.
