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The High School graduation rates that are generally published in the mainstream press are very misleading and are uncritically used by almost everyone without realizing that they are, as The Economic Policy Institute says, "exceedingly inaccurate."In one week, the Wall Street Journal ran two opinion pieces, one by Chester Finn and another by William McGurn which excoriate American public schools for low graduation rates.But they do so using the same, badly flawed graduation statistics generated by Editorial Projects in Education (EPE), Publisher of Education Week magazine.The methodology used does not really measure graduation rates but yet, the media and the public use the data as gospel, not realizing that they are unrelated to actual graduation rates.

EducationWeek has just published another report, "Diplomas Count: 2008,"(1)which badly distorts American graduation rates by using its flawed methodology.The report states, "Nationwide, about 71 percent of 9th graders make it to graduation four years later, according to data from 2005, the latest available. And that figure drops to 58 percent for Hispanics, 55 percent for African-Americans, and 51 percent for Native Americans."The analysis that produced such numbers has no right to do so as you will see.

Here is how EPE calculates graduation rates:

Graduation Rate = X X X

Even EPE says that this represents the PROBABILITY of a 9^th grader completing high school.You can see that this calculation has nothing to do with actual students---only a probability.When students transfer in and students transfer out of a school it confounds any sensibility of the calculations and corrupts EPE's calculations.

Lawrence Mishel, one of the most respected economists in America, and Joydeep Roy, both of the Economic Policy Institute, have recently published a paper that debunks the methodology and labels it "exceedingly inaccurate."(2)In addition, University of Chicago Professors James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine also agree and say so. (3)

The worst part of this is that top management of Education Week and Colin Powell's Promise Alliance, which have both uncritically published these data, have no idea of how misleading they are.Looking only at the number of students enrolled each year by grade, without regard to which students are in next year's and last year's classes, as EPE does, produces less-than-useful results.Two simplified examples will demonstrate the fallacy of their approach.

A high school freshman class has 100 students enrolled.Four years later the school produces 45 graduates.EPE would say that the graduation rate was 45%.But what if all 100 transfer out to other schools and all of them graduate elsewhere? In this case, the actual graduation rate would be 100% instead of EPE's 45%. On the other hand, suppose that all 100 actually did drop out, and before graduation day, 45 students transferred into the school and all of them graduated from their new school.In this case, EPE would say that the graduation rate was 45% when it was actually zero.Thus, using EPE methodology, the real answer could always actually be anywhere between 0% and 100%.

EPE cannot estimate state or district graduation rates, but they claim to anyway.  It is impossible to determine district, city or state graduation rates without a data system that can track individual students through their entire high school careers.Few school districts or states have such a system.But New York City does and it finds that simplistic graduation measures understate their graduation rate by about 25 percentage points.Jay Greene, another who uses the simplistic methods, estimated the New York City school graduation rate at 43% (4) and EPE estimated 45% (5).NY's data system followed each student for a seven-year period finding that 68% actually graduated while 2% were still in school.This difference is huge and is attributed to three categories of students that both EPE and Greene unfortunately count as dropouts:(a) kids moving to new neighborhoods and enrolling there, (b) some graduating in more than 4 years and (c) significant numbers of youngsters still in school---not having dropped out---after 4 years.Thus, EPE and Greene data cannot be taken seriously.

National data can help cut through the misimpression.The Census Bureau attempts to assess national graduation rates by determining, for all people aged 18-24, whether they have finished high school.The latest report shows that in 2004, 87% of all 18-24-year olds had completed high school (6).EPE ---and thus the Education Week and Promise Alliance estimated national graduation rate of 70% appears to be way off the mark.

There also is a general misunderstanding about the reasons for dropouts.It is questionable as to how high graduation rates can possibly be as long as so much poverty exists.When the causes of dropouts are examined, the vast majority are likely caused by societal factors, outside the control of the schools and closely correlated with poverty.These include family financial problems requiring a kid to drop out and work full time, pregnancy, incarceration, drugs, gangs, unwillingness to exert the necessary effort and, in spite of heroic efforts by teachers, some students get so far behind in schoolwork that they have no hope of catching up and drop out.Some dropouts are surely caused by poor teaching and boring classes.But preliminary research seems to show that this is not a major factor.Therefore, one must ask the question, how high can the graduation rates ever become?

The good news is that from 1972 until 2004, national graduation rates have climbed from 86% to 92% for whites and from 72% to 83% for blacks, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics (6).So hold the phone and take a deep breath.We don't have the dropout crisis in our schools that some alarmists would lead you to believe, but decreasing poverty might do more than anything else to help.

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Dr. Solomon is a retired University of Kentucky professor and can be reached at mbsolomon@aol.com

(1) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/06/05/40execsum.h27.html

(2) http://www.epaa.info/ojs/index.php/epaa/article/view/EPAA_v16n11/13

(3) http://members.aol.com/mbsolomon/fontaine.htm

(4) Greene and Winters, Civic Report No. 48 April 2006, Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates, Manhattan Institute.

(5).http://www.americaspromise.org/uploadedFiles/AmericasPromiseAlliance/Dropout_Crisis/SWANSONCitiesInCrisis040108.pdf

(6) Dropout Rates in the U.S 2004, NCES 2007-024