Va., Md. Revising Diploma Counts

Estimates of High School Graduation Rates Seen as Inaccurate

Between the start of freshman year and graduation, the class of 2005 at Frederick Douglass High School in Prince George's County shrank by more than one-third. Yet according to school officials, 90 percent of the class graduated.

Driven by a conviction that graduation rates are widely overstated in the region's public schools, legislators in Maryland and Virginia are seeking a more accurate count of how many students earn diplomas four years after they enter high school, one of the most vital -- but most poorly tracked -- indicators in public education. Bills before both legislatures, along with a resolution passed last fall by the D.C. school board, are part of a national effort to adopt a common formula for figuring graduation rates.

"Hopefully, with this bill, we'll begin to capture some accurate data," said Sen. Gwendolyn T. Britt (D-Prince George's), who sponsored the measure in the Maryland Senate. "And it may not be a pretty picture."

Leaders of Maryland and Virginia school systems say they are moving toward tracking individual students, using identification numbers generated by statewide testing to follow students from one school to another. Educators in both states say that by about 2009 they will know with near certainty who graduates and who does not, with or without a change in the law.

For years, Washington area school systems have estimated graduation rates based on the number of students known to have dropped out -- an equation only as accurate as each high school's ability to track dropouts.

Critics of the system say that, try as they might, most school administrators simply cannot track down every student who has left to confirm whether he or she enrolled at another school. Some administrators may not even try all that hard, given that a lower dropout rate and a higher graduation rate make a school look good.

"It's a highly manipulable statistic," said Nettie Legters, a research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University.

Elaine Mitchell, an Upper Marlboro parent, had a son, a daughter and two nephews who were under her care attend Frederick Douglass High. She said she continued to receive bus routes and bulletins in the mail for the older nephew long after he had moved to Colorado in 2003, even after she did "everything we needed to do" to report his exit. "My nephew was probably counted in the numbers," Mitchell said, "and he wasn't there."

School system administrators defend the accuracy of their graduation and dropout data but acknowledge that it is hard work to follow every student out the door.

"Sometimes they just sort of drop off the radar," said Bruce Hislop, accountability reporting officer for Prince George's schools.

Researchers say a better way of determining graduation rates would be to consider attrition, which calculates the dwindling size of a high school class over time.

A 2004 report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group, used attrition data to estimate a graduation rate of about 75 percent in Maryland and Virginia and about 65 percent in the District. The estimates were derived from enrollment data for the class of 2001.