Richard Fry, Pew Hispanic Center
June 2003
A new report on Hispanic graduation rates from the Pew Hispanic Center puts a new spin on an old set of faulty data. The faulty data: a Census survey purporting to show relatively low dropout rates (about 15 percent) among Hispanic youngsters. The spin: immigrants who dropped out before they came to the U.S. have been wrongly counted as dropouts so even that low rate is inflated. Richard Fry, the report's author, argues that, because of this over-reporting, U.S. public schools have been blamed more than they should be for Hispanic dropouts. Unfortunately, removing immigrants from the data set doesn't even come close to rescuing the Census survey from a number of more serious problems. For example, it doesn't include prisons, where a disproportionate number of dropouts reside. Also, it report appears to count GED recipients as high school graduates. More reliable ways of calculating the graduation rate, such as using enrollment data (which would only include students enrolled in U.S. public schools), consistently yield overall dropout rates around 30 percent, and even higher rates for minorities like Hispanics. In this report, Fry simply dismisses such calculations without any real basis. You can read it at http://www.pewhispanic.org/site/docs/pdf/high%20school%20dropout%20report--final.pdf.
