States' Graduation-Rate Effort Inches Forward

Three years after the National Governors Association announced that all 50 members had agreed to standardize their states’ graduation-rate formulas, the group is only marginally closer to its goal of a truly national definition of high school graduation rates, according to NGA data released late last month.

The Washington-based organization’s latest progress report finds that only 16 states currently calculate and publicly report a graduation rate consistent with the formula agreed to in 2005 in the NGA’s Graduation Counts Compact .

That’s just three more states than reported their graduation rates according to that formula in 2006 , when the last...