States’ Graduation Data Seen as Undercounting Dropouts

A sharply worded report released June 23 takes states to task for calculating graduation rates in ways that it contends yield artificially low estimates of the nation’s dropout problem—and it upbraids federal education officials for letting them do it.

“We’ve got to end this rampant dishonesty about graduation rates,” Kati Haycock, the director of the Education Trust, the Washington-based research and advocacy group that put together the report, said in a statement. “And it would sure help if the U.S. Department of Education stopped sitting on the sidelines and worked to put an end to these shameful practices.”

Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states were required in January to provide statewide graduation rates for the 2002-03 school year. But, according to the Education Trust’s study, three states—Alabama, Louisiana, and Massachusetts—did not report the data at all. Another seven states failed to break down the data, as required under the law, to show separate graduation rates for certain groups of students, such as those with disabilities, from low-income families, and from various...