The U.S. Department of Education, which is typically tied up spending millions of taxpayer dollars on wasteful abstinence programs, or firing crooked Reading First directors, actually did something good this week. States will now be required to use a single formula to calculate graduation and dropout rates. The Times reports:
The adoption of a federal graduation formula would correct one of the most glaring weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Although the law requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, it allows states to set their own formulas for calculating them. As a result, most states have used formulas that understate the number of dropouts, and official graduation rates are not comparable from state to state. The No Child law establishes no national school completion goal.
In The new formula that will be used to compute graduation and dropout rates has not yet been determined, but is likely to incorporate a cohort approach, in which students are tracked from 9th grade through graduation. This method will reveal the truth: that nearly a third of all high school students never finish. And that’s something we all need to know.
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