Missing the Mark on Graduation Rates

A Response to 'The Exaggerated Dropout Crisis'

By Jay P. Greene, Marcus A. Winters, & Christopher B. Swanson

The economist Lawrence Mishel, who is the president of the Economic Policy Institute, presented several weeks ago in these pages a critique of recent research on dropout rates. ( "The Exaggerated Dropout Crisis," March 8, 2006.) Its attack on calculations of high school graduation rates that use official enrollment statistics from the U.S. Department of Education is off base on a number of key points.

In his essay, Mr. Mishel mischaracterizes the findings of our previous studies and expresses an extraordinary faith in the ability of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, or CPS, to do something for which it was never meant: produce accurate calculations of high school graduation rates. He also seems all too willing to accept at face value officially reported state and district statistics that education researchers would, at the very least, approach with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Independent calculations, including ours, put the country’s high school graduation rate near 70 percent overall, and near 50 percent for minority students. Mr. Mishel incorrectly claims that these estimates find that graduation rates have declined recently. In fact, we find that the rates have largely been stagnant, with some signs of improvement in...