Citing low high school graduation rates among many students, particularly minorities, the Bush administration on Tuesday outlined plans to hold schools accountable for their performance starting next year and to require the uniform reporting of dropout and completion data by 2013.
While many details of the new system are still pending, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said it is important to hold schools responsible as soon as possible. “Dropouts from the class of 2007 alone will cost our nation more than $300 billion in lost wages, lost taxes and lost productivity,” she said in an address in Detroit about the administrative changes being made to the No Child Left Behind Law.
“Increasing graduation rates by just 5 percent, for male students alone, would save us nearly $8 billion each year in crime-related costs.”
States would use an “interim” method to calculate graduation rates, though Spellings praised an idea proposed by several researchers to compare the number of entering ninth-graders to the number who complete high school four years later. This idea has the backing of advocates such as the National Governors’ Association and Editorial Projects in Education, which recently released a study showing low graduation rates in many U.S. cities.
All states eventually would use the same formula, and the public would receive information both in the aggregate and broken down by race and income level.
The accountability process would begin in the school 2008-’09 year, Spellings said. In order to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB, schools and districts would have to meet a graduation rate goal set by their states.
All states and schools then would move toward a uniform system to document graduation rates beginning in 2013.
Recent studies and anecdotal data show a pattern of inconsistent reporting of graduation rates. In some districts, students must declare themselves as dropouts before they are listed as such. Elsewhere, a student’s promise to take a General Educational Development (GED) at a future date may keep him off the official dropout list.
