One in Three Children Left Behind

In a wealthy country like this, only 70% of students graduate high school, and schools are fudging the data to make the dropout rate seem less severe:

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.

“I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race,” said Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools. “Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.”

Furthermore, although the law requires schools to make only minimal annual improvements in their rates, reporting lower rates to Washington could nevertheless cause more high schools to be labeled failing — a disincentive for accurate reporting. With Congressional efforts to rewrite the law stalled, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has begun using her executive powers to correct the weaknesses in it. Ms. Spellings’s efforts started Tuesday with a measure aimed at focusing resources on the nation’s worst schools. Graduation rates are also on her agenda.

In an interview, Ms. Spellings said she might require states to calculate their graduation rate according to one federal formula.

“I’m considering settling this once and for all,” she said, “by defining a single federal graduation rate and requesting states to report it that way. That would finally put this issue to rest.”

In 2001, the year the law was drafted, one of the first of a string of revisionist studies argued that the nation’s schools were losing more students than previously thought.

Jay P. Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, compared eighth-grade enrollments with the number of diplomas bestowed five years later to estimate that the nation’s graduation rate was 71 percent. Federal statistics had put the figure 15 points higher.

Still, Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law. And when states negotiated their plans to carry it out, the Bush administration allowed them to use dozens of different ways to report graduation rates.

Instead of worrying so much about what the definition of "graduate" is, why aren't schools and parents worrying about why one in three American kids isn't finishing high school; about why one in three kids is being thrown into the educational trash can?

The sure bet of a college diploma as ticket to higher income may no longer apply, as more professional careers every day are being outsourced. But the lack of a high school diploma is almost a sure ticket to a lifetime of poverty.

When you look at the Republican economic agenda as implemented over the last seven years -- huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and tokens for everyone else, arbitrary testing standards in schools that measure nothing, a diminishing job base, it should be crystal clear to those "Reagan Democrats" that the Republicans have absolutely no interest in allowing every American the opportunity to enter their club if they just work hard enough. Instead, they are quietly building the kind of plutocracy that marked the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Those working and middle class voters who vote for representatives who support these efforts are voting against their own interest and that of their children.