NCLB Rules Back Common Rate

By Catherine Gewertz

While reaffirming the primacy of the four-year graduation rate, federal regulations have opened a door that allows schools to get credit under the No Child Left Behind Act for students who take five or more years to earn a high school diploma.

In a bid to illuminate how well high schools are serving students, the revised regulations, issued in December 2008, tighten up the rules governing how states must calculate and report graduation rates, and how they will be held to account for them. The highest-profile change requires states to depict their graduation rates the same way: as the proportion of each incoming freshman class that earns standard diplomas four years later. Previously, states could decide for themselves how to calculate their graduation rates.

Eighteen states already use a four-year-cohort calculation that the National Governors Association urged in 2005, and which governors in all 50 states have agreed to use eventually. That approach allows selected English-language learners and students with disabilities to be reassigned into the following year’s cohort, essentially letting them take...