OF ALL the shortcomings of the federal No Child Left Behind law, one of the most glaring is its failure to set goals for improvements in high school graduation rates. To make matters worse, the US Department of Education has not even mandated that states use a uniform method of calculating dropout rates. As a result, many states have been living in a fool's paradise by calculating these rates in ways that grossly underestimate the problem.
The department itself recognizes that dropouts are a problem. It reports that dropouts earn 30 percent less than high school graduates, when they can find jobs at all. They are 15 percent more likely than graduates to be unemployed and much more likely to end up on welfare or in prison.
Still, it is only now - seven years after passage of No Child Left Behind - that Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is threatening to establish a single system for calculating dropouts and asking states to report them that way. By one method that many researchers use - dividing total number of high school graduates by the number of ninth graders four years earlier - the US graduation rate is about 70 percent, well behind countries like South Korea (96 percent) or Russia (87 percent).
Standardizing calculations would end the absurdity of Mississippi using methods that allow it to report a graduation rate of 87 percent when the Department of Education figures it at 63.3 percent. In Massachusetts the gap was much smaller, with both federal and state calculations placing the graduation rate at about 79 or 80 percent.
While Spellings's department has let this charade continue, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has zeroed in on graduation rates in its efforts to improve education. In a 2006 report, it referred to the nation's "silent epidemic" of dropouts. The report drew attention not just to the damaged life chances of dropouts, but also to the costs to society of their lost productivity and their greater rates of incarceration, poor health, and demands on social services.
With congressional efforts to rewrite the federal No Child Left Behind law stalemated, the department is at least taking small steps to improve the law's focus. Last week, Spellings called for concentrating resources on the country's worst-performing schools. And her new attention to the dropout problem, while long in coming, is a relief.
A nation cannot make a habit of leaving 30 percent of its young people behind and expect to prosper. Spellings should make the epidemic of dropouts less silent by demanding standardized data on them - and refusing to let states underplay the problem.
