SEATTLE — Comparing graduation rates from one state to the next or even one school to another can be as difficult as trying to help your children with their math homework: everyone has their own way of coming up with an answer.
That challenge is expected to go away within the next five years, but not without more pain, aggravation and money.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced in April proposed new rules that would require states to assign each student a unique ID number to facilitate tracking from the time a student enters 9th grade until he graduates or drops out of school.
Spellings’ call — which mirrors an agreement from the National Governors Association — will force every district to face up to the reality of a more scientific graduation rate and quit hiding behind more positive estimates.
Washington state assigned a unique ID to every student four years ago, so this year’s senior class will be the first with four years of data, so the 2008 graduation rate will be based on the method Spellings wants to mandate for all states.
State officials don’t know if the new method will help or hurt Washington’s steady 70 percent on-time graduation rate, said Joe Willhoft, director of assessment for the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
But, Willhoft adds, the point of the effort is to come up with a number that tells the truth.
One of the facts covered up by graduation rate estimates is that only about one half of minorities graduate from high school, while those without a diploma face a bleak future. No Child Left Behind was supposed to focus on the inequalities in the nation’s public schools, but it has done little to improve graduation rates.
The federal government has offered grants to improve state education departments’ data systems, which may be used to pay for a system to track students by unique IDs, said U.S. Education Department spokesman Chad Colby. The federal government gave a total of $62.2 million to 13 states in 2007 for data systems, which can cost millions.
New York is also in the process of adopting the new approach, and state officials expect the more accurate numbers will be significantly lower in some cases because many schools used an index that didn’t account for students who dropped out in ninth and tenth grades.
Under No Child Left Behind, states may use their own methods of calculating graduation rates and set their own goals for improving them. Spellings proposal would tighten up what many feel is one of the biggest loopholes of the federal law.
Education officials in most states say they’ve been working for years to move their own accounting from educated guesses to real math.
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