COLIN POWELL: TRUE DROP-OUT RATE A CATASTROPHE

Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower that 50 percent for school year 2003-04, reports Ken Thomas for the Associated Press. According to data recently released by America's Promise Alliance, many urban areas showed a considerable gap between their inner-city schools and the surrounding suburbs. "When more than one million students a year drop out of high school, it's more than a problem, it's a catastrophe," said former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. In some cases, the findings provide glaringly different numbers than those reported by districts and states. Currently, states are allowed to calculate their own graduation rates using all sorts of methods, many of which critics say are based on unreliable information. New Mexico, for example, has defined its graduation rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who receive a diploma, thereby ignoring all those that drop out before12th grade. To help alleviate the tangle of inaccurate state data that have obscured the severity of the nation's high school dropout crisis, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will require all states to use the same federal formula. This requirement would be one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions ever taken by the federal government, reports Sam Dillon for the New York Times (second link). Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, said the proposed measure would be considerably more important than most U.S. Department of Education regulations because "it will basically affect every high school in the country."
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Read the complete article from the Associated Press.
http://tinyurl.com/59g2dj

Read an article on the subject from The New York Times.
http://tinyurl.com/37nw3r

Thanks to the Public Education Network for the leads.
http://tinyurl.com/68h6wr