Prometheus 6

Dropout Nation
The number of high school students who leave before graduating is higher--much higher--than you think. Inside one town's struggle to reverse the tide
By NATHAN THORNBURGH / SHELBYVILLE

Check the figures being dropped. Little emphasis added here and there.

In today's data-happy era of accountability, testing and No Child Left Behind, here is the most astonishing statistic in the whole field of education: an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly 1 out of 3 public high school students won't graduate, not just in Shelbyville but around the nation. For Latinos and African Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50%. Virtually no community, small or large, rural or urban, has escaped the problem.

There is a small but hardy band of researchers who insist the dropout rates don't quite approach those levels. They point to their pet surveys that suggest a rate of only 15% to 20%. The dispute is difficult to referee, particularly in the wake of decades of lax accounting by states and schools. But the majority of analysts and lawmakers have come to this consensus: the numbers have remained unchecked at approximately 30% through two decades of intense educational reform, and the magnitude of the problem has been consistently, and often willfully, ignored.

How did they calculate this horrible statistic?

In 2001, Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published a study that peeled back the layers of statistical legerdemain. Poring over raw education data, he asked himself a basic question: What percentage of kids who start at a high school finish? The answers led Greene and subsequent researchers around the country to place the national graduation rate at anywhere from 64% to 71%. It's a rate that most researchers say has remained fairly static since the 1970s, despite increased attention on the plight of public schools and a vigorous educational-reform movement.

And how did it get this bad without anyone noticing?

...Shelbyville had been comforted by its self-reported--and wildly inaccurate--graduation rate of up to 98%. The school district arrived at that number by using a commonly accepted statistical feint, counting any dropout who promises to take the GED test later on as a graduating student.

The GED trick is only one of many deployed by state and local governments around the country to disguise the real dropout rates. Houston, for example, had its notorious "leaver codes"--dozens of excuses, such as pregnancy and military service, that were often applied to students who were later reclassified as dropouts by outside auditors. The Federal Government has been similarly deceptive, producing rosy graduation-rate estimates--usually between 85% and 90%--by relying only on a couple of questions buried deep within the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. The survey asks whether respondents have a diploma or GED. Critics say the census count severely underreports dropout numbers, in part because it doesn't include transients or prisoners, populations with a high proportion of dropouts.

You know there's an economic reason for this decades-long deception. From The Impact of School Quality on Real House Prices: Interjurisdictional Effects, by Donald R. Haurin of Ohio State University's Departments of Economics and Finance:

Explaining differences in house prices requires hypotheses to be drawn from both intraurban and interurban economic models. We find that real constant-quality house prices are explained by factors from both perspectives and they combine to explain 70% of the observed price variation.

School quality is the most important cause of the variation in constant-quality house prices. We find that each percentage point increase in the pass rate of ninth grade students on a statewide proficiency exam increases house prices by one-half percent. Because pass rates vary among sampled communities from 6 to 89 percent, constant-quality house prices vary greatly due to this factor alone.

Curiously, it also explains some of the resistance to affirmative action-type programs. You see, even when people aren't educated, they're usually not stupid...when you know one out of three of your boys are drop-outs, yet no one talks about them you feel ignored.

On the other hand, if you don't ignore it you take severe ego blows. You have to admit that YOU are part of the problem. And if you don't think ego blows are more important to folks than education, well...I just don't know what to tell you.