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Policymakers and the public are demanding increased accountability from the nation’s educational system. Yet decidedly mixed messages are being sent about the numbers of students who are actually graduating from the country’s high schools.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), whose measures are used by the Department of Education, quoted a national high school completion rate of 86 percent for the class of 1998. At the same time, leading researchers from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Urban Institute, and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University estimate that the national rate is closer to 68–70 percent.

Research from the Urban Institute suggests that approximately 50 percent of students of color do not finish high school. Males are faring substantially worse than females, and the situation is especially dismal for students in our nation’s largest high-poverty urban districts, where as few as a third of all students graduate.

Accurate, reliable information about how many of the nation’s children are not completing high school—and who those children are—is critical.

Inconsistent and Inaccurate Data: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires states to annually report graduation rates, by subgroups (socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, English proficiency, and disability). That law and accompanying regulations outline requirements for graduation rate calculations, which must meet one of the following two requirements:

1. The percentage of students measured from the beginning of high school, who graduate from high school with a regular diploma (not including an alternative degree that is not fully aligned with the state’s academic standards, such as a certificate or a GED) in the standard number of years; or

2. Another definition developed by the state and approved by the U.S. Department of Education that more accurately measures the rate of students who graduate from high school with a regular diploma. State definitions must avoid counting dropouts as transfers.

On the surface, the NCLB requirements for calculating graduation rates seem rigorous. Unfortunately, the Department of Education has not effectively clarified what states must do meet these requirements. Rather than ensure that state definitions more accurately measure graduation rates, the Department of Education has approved state-developed definitions that fail to account for large numbers of students who were enrolled but never graduated. Many states, for example, measure high school graduation based on twelfth-grade enrollment only.

By measuring their graduation rates based on the number of students who start the twelfth-grade year against those who graduate at the end of that year, these states are not accounting for the dropouts who leave school before beginning twelfth-grade. Numerous researches have demonstrated that the majority of dropouts leave without ever completing ninth grade.

Most states use the method developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to calculate rates. This method relies heavily on a count of the number of students who are officially reported as having dropped out, rather than a count of the number of enrolled students. By measuring in this way, states inflate their graduation rate figures because collected dropout data exclude all those students who leave the educational system without officially notifying the school of their departure. The sad reality is that many of the students who drop out disappear from school without formal notice or effective follow-up by the school.

Investing in Accurate Measures: To remedy this situation, both in terms of poor methodology and faulty data collection, significant financial resources will be required. To date, Congress has not made calculating accurate graduation rates a priority, appropriating NCES with only $1 million for graduation rate tracking. In contrast, the federal government allocated $40 million to track student achievement through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nationally representative measure of what America’s students know in the areas of reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S. history, civics, geography, and the arts. Additionally, NCLB also provided roughly $400 million for other testing in grades three through eight in 2005.

Making States Truly Accountable: Improving the ways that graduation rates are calculated is only half the battle. According to the research done by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, most state plans demonstrate no real accountability when it comes to graduation rates. For example, in California, where the goal is a 100 percent graduation rate, if a school or district makes just one-tenth of 1 percent improvement in graduation, it has met its accountability requirements. At this rate of improvement, it would take black and Latino students in the state 500 years to reach 100 percent graduation. Alarmingly, most state accountability plans operate in similar ways.

Conclusion: The federal government must play a leadership role in ensuring states calculate graduation rates using a longitudinal method. In addition, the federal government must hold states accountable for improvement in graduation rates. The United States is in the midst of an educational crisis that, if left unresolved, is likely to have devastating effects on our national economy and competitive position in the world. Nationally, only about 70 percent of our high school students graduate on time, and in many urban districts the percentage drops to around 50 percent. Fewer than 35 percent of those who do graduate are ready for college. And of our country’s eighth graders, only around 30 percent are proficient readers, ready for the challenges of increasingly complex textbooks and materials.

An expanded issue brief by the Alliance for Excellent Education can be found here