Maybe there's some truth to the complaints of education officials that those who changed the graduation-rate formula did so to make public schools look bad. It's much easier to push a school-choice agenda if high schools are graduating only about 75 percent, as the new calculation says, rather than 90 percent, as the old one did. But couldn't it also be said that, using the old formula, educators were artificially inflating the graduation rate to make themselves look better than they deserved to? The response of the public-education establishment isn't encouraging. Here's someone from a Grant County school system, being about as defensive as officials in every other part of the state:
Dee Ballinger, director of guidance at Eastbrook High School, said although the new formula will help schools track students, it will be a very trying effort for school systems.
"There are a lot of issues that are hard for us to swallow," he said. "We want to explain to people why it is different. It is not that we have fewer people graduating. It's the calculation."
Both ways of calculating the graduation rate are arbitrary, and you could make good arguments for either one. It depends on whether you want to count include things such as GED takers and those who take longer than four years in the success column, and whether you assume that kids who leave for a new school system graduate in four years. The important thing is to have a system everyone understands. It would also be helpful if the formula were the same, or close to the same, in every state so we could compare our rate to that of others. Whatever the real non-graduation rate is, whether it is 10 percent or 25 percent or something in between, it represents kids who aren't completing the most basic step they will need in the future. Instead of mounting a PR campaign to tell us their side of the story, educators need to share their ideas for reaching more of those kids.
