Report Faults Calif. on Graduation Calculation

California overstates the number of students graduating from high school and should use more accurate measures for tracking dropouts, a study released last week contends.

“Confronting the Graduation Crisis in California,” a 14-page analysis by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, argues that misleading reporting of dropout and graduation rates has provided a skewed picture of how many students are graduating in the state and around the nation.

Like many states, California uses a “flawed National Center for Education Statistics formula that dramatically underestimates the actual number of dropouts,” according to the March 24 report, which includes work by researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities, the Urban Institute, and the...