Graduation day–who will attend?

We don’t want to embarrass the DOE…OK, maybe we do…but where are the graduation reports? We’re talking about LAST YEAR’s graduates, the Class of 2005. DOE’s annual reports of graduation and dropout rates are usually published in March or February for the previous year’s graduating class, but we’re heard nothing and it’s almost the end of June.

We ask because graduation rates have been at the top of the national education agenda all week–really longer than that. On Tuesday Education Week released its big report on graduation rates and it was on the cover of USA Today. Diplomas Count, using data from Ed Week’s new research director, Chris Swanson, reported that 30 percent of the nation’s 9th graders fail to get a diploma. NYC’s graduation rate is really 39 percent, the third lowest of major urban centers in the country, according to Swanson. That’s 15 points lower than New York City’s own report for the same year, 2002-03.

You’d think the DOE would at least publish its own figures, but we waited in vain. Maybe the imminent departure of Lori Mei, the DOE’s highly regarded and evidently underappreciated head of the testing and accountability division, has something to do with the delay?

Anyway, everyone else weighed in. Of particular importance were the criticisms by Economic Policy Institute president Larry Mishel and his collaborator, Joydeep Roy. Mishel and Roy recently published Rethinking Graduation Rates and Trends, finding Swanson’s methodology for counting graduation rates totally inaccurate. Without going into extreme detail, let’s just say they demonstrate that the huge “bulge” of 9th graders that results from large retention rates in urban systems like New York’s, and the inability of Swanson’s system to account for the migration of huge numbers of city students in and out of the system undercounts graduates. Larry believes Swanson is off by 20 points.

For an amazing and detailed discussion of the Mishel-Swanson debate, check out Sherman Dorn’s blog site. (Be sure to also click on his Main page for other writing on graduation rates.)

Mei herself was quoted in a couple of newspapers saying that the city actually tracks individual students, rather than projecting graduation rates with a formula as Swanson does, and that the correct graduation rate is about 50 percent in four years and significantly more by seven years.

That’s not great. The NYC dropout rate is high by anyone’s count, and most of it occurs in 9th and 10th grades. Kids at risk don’t get very far into high school before the demands catch up with them and they vanish. That’s what we should be looking at next: what accounts for the 9th grade dropout phenomenon and how to help change it. It’s a good time to start this discussion–what do you say?

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