Christopher B. Swanson, Education Policy Center, The Urban Institute
August 2003
This clear and concise report, initially presented at a conference sponsored by the Harvard Civil Rights Project (and one of the few interesting reports to emerge from that ill-starred venture), offers a method for calculating graduation rates that states may find useful now that NCLB requires them to include such measures in their accountability plans. Calculating a graduation rate may seem simple, but is actually fraught with difficulty. Thus the "conventional wisdom" from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) - that U.S. graduation rates hover between 85 and 90 percent - is deeply misleading. Superior methods show that the true rate is, sadly, closer to two-thirds. Here, Swanson presents one of these methods, which he developed, and recaps the second, developed earlier by Manhattan's Jay Greene. [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=27#153] Both methods consider how many students actually graduate; NCES, on the other hand, relies on drop-out rates, which are notoriously flawed. This is no mere academic quarrel. States need a sound methodology to meet the spirit of NCLB, but unfortunately too many states are instead opting for the NCES approach, which meets the barest letter of the law but surely violates its intent. [For each state's plans see Swanson's separate NCLB Implementation Report] Both Swanson's and Greene's methods rely on more readily available data. Greene's may be slightly more accurate while Swanson's is easier to calculate, but both represent a quantum improvement over the NCES approach in terms of accuracy and data availability. States would be remiss to ignore them. And everyone should note the troubling results they reveal - particularly that barely half of minority youngsters graduate from high school in America today. And that in some states the average student has only a 50-50 chance of graduating. To learn more, click here.
