No Child Left Behind & the REAL Drop Out Rate

[LaWood]

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
By SAM DILLON NYT

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals. ......

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/educa ... ref=slogin

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Cheating is the only way states keep their funding and don't get their schools closed. NCLB has done nothing except teach children - and the schools that warehouse them - to cheat.

FYI - NW AR, especially Springdale, is having problems with NCLB because of ESL and special ed students. The ESL kids used to take an alternate test, but as of last year, if they've been in this country for at least one year - whether or not they can speak English or were literate in Spanish - they take the same test everyone else does. So do the special ed kids. Want a sure-fire way to make schools look bad?