What’s up with special ed graduation rates??

The State Education Department just published a new report on graduation rates, which the New York Times and Daily News, and others, all picked up on. The most startling finding, on first blush, is the 10-point difference between what the state and the city call the four-year graduation rate for New York City. The state says that 43.5 percent of the NYC Class of 2005 graduated on time, while the city (in its new Mayor’s Management Report) says the figure is 53.2 percent.

But that is at least partly explained by different counting methods. For one, the city includes four-year GEDs which the state does not. For another, the city counts its graduates in August, after summer school, while the state counts in June.

More troubling, though, is the story for special education students. SED finds that of students with disabilities who entered New York City high schools in 2001, only 17 percent graduated in four years with a Regents or local diploma, compared with 45 percent of similar students in the rest of the state. What’s worse, 30 percent dropped out, twice the 15 percent rate for students with disabilities in the rest of the state. (Another 18 percent of NYC students with disabilities received IEP diplomas, slightly higher than the 13 percent in the rest of the state.)

These are very stark contrasts. They are also wildly different than the city’s claims. The city says only 18 percent of the 2001 group of special education students dropped out, and (oddly) that only 10 percent graduated.

What’s up with the numbers? Probably the definitions of “special ed” vary. But what’s going on with high school special ed? This is a vast terrain. Taking on the numbers, let alone the reality underneath the numbers, is more than one blog post can address. But SED has hoisted a red flag.

The first place to turn is the incomparable Advocates for Children, which last year published a 70-page report finding that the majority of students receiving special education services in New York City leave school witout a high school diploma, and that they are graduating with regular diplomas at rates far far below such students in the rest of the state and the nation as a whole. They also break down the rates by disability type (learning, behavioral, physical, etc.).

Not surprisingly, Advocates called for a special focus on this problem and posed a series of potential solutions. To my knowledge none of this has happened. Instead, the city has not even published its graduation report that the MMR number must have come from. And the Chancellor told the Daily News, “I think their [SED's] numbers are aligned with ours.” No they’re not.