High Rankings For Area Schools

The report showed striking success in Baltimore County, a school system where 40 percent of students are black. The national graduation rate for African Americans is 53 percent. The county's overall graduation rate is 81.1 percent. The report doesn't break down the numbers by race, but county officials say the rate for black students is virtually the same as the rate for all students.

A study released last year by the Schott Foundation for Public Education ranked Baltimore County first in the nation for its graduation rate among black males. The study, which considered districts with 10,000 or more black males, ranked Montgomery and Prince George's second and third.

Joe A. Hairston, the Baltimore County superintendent, cited a number of programs, including Advancement Via Individual Determination, which emphasizes such college-preparatory skills as note-taking and steers students toward rigorous courses.

"We don't treat them as though they are African American males," Hairston said. "We treat them as though they're students."

State and local education leaders are slowly but surely moving toward a more accurate -- and less flattering -- method of calculating graduation rates, said Christopher Swanson, research director of Editorial Projects in Education.

Virginia's Education Department is committed to implementing an attrition-based graduation formula by 2008, the District by 2010 and Maryland by 2011. The new method holds the promise of yielding something close to an exact count: Using unique student identifiers, states can track the precise number of youths who transfer in and out of a school over time.

Under the current method, based on dropouts, Montgomery reported a 92 percent graduation rate in 2004, 12 points higher than the figure cited in the Education Week study. Prince George's reported an 87 percent rate, 20 points higher than the number cited in the new study.

"Maryland's using a method that, like many states, tends to inflate the rate," Swanson said. "I think we're seeing more acceptance of these [new] numbers."