Clarify High School Graduation

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced late last month that she will take steps to ensure that all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time.

A new, precise federal standard would be a welcome change. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states have been allowed to use their own methods of calculating graduation rates and to set their own benchmarks for improvement. Too many states took advantage of this latitude. Research has shown that, between 2002 and 2005, more than half the states inflated graduation rates between 10 percentage points and 20 percentage points.

The pumped-up figures mislead not only federal officials but the public into believing that those states' school systems are more effective.

"The new regulations are very encouraging," said Daria Hall, assistant director of the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit. "For far, far too long, states have used graduation-rate definitions that are inaccurate, inconsistent and did not provide communities, parents, educators or policy-makers with the information they need."DO THE MATHThe graduation calculation proposed by Spellings parallels one suggested by the National Governors Association in 2005: Divide the number of on-time graduates by the number of ninth-graders who entered four years earlier, while allowing exceptions for special-education students, transfers and recent immigrants with limited English proficiency.

The NGA proposal did not count as on-time graduates students who leave school and later earn general educational development diplomas.

Neither, for that matter, does the federal Education Department. And that's where Florida's Department of Education's calculation hits a snag.FLORIDA'S STANDARDBy Florida statute, high school equivalency diplomas "have equal status with other high school diplomas for all state purposes, including admission to any state university or community college."

Thus, Florida DOE publishes two graduation rates: one for federal officials, and one for the state that includes GED recipients and is somewhat higher.

Florida education officials acknowledge the discrepancy and say that both the state and the NCLB graduation rates are available to the public on the agency's Web site, www.fldoe.org.

If you can navigate the reports on that page, you can see some of the discrepancies. For example, for the 2003-2004 school year, the state DOE's Web site lists its graduation rate as 71.6 percent. The federal agency, on its Web site, lists Florida's graduation rate for the same school year as 66.4 percent. Two years later, the state DOE listed the graduation rate at 71 percent. The NCLB rate was 68 percent.

To its credit, Florida has followed most the NCLB recommendations for tracking. In other states, the differences are much worse. That is unacceptable.

Graduation rates should be easy to understand and compare, across the nation. Secretary Spellings' initiative deserves nationwide support - and Florida should be a leader in that reform by striving for one clear, accurate graduation rate. If that takes an act of the Legislature, it will be worth it.

The release says, in part, "Florida's graduation rate rose to 72.4 percent in 2006-07."