Tennessee seeking standard grad rate

Tennessee and the federal government disagree on the state’s high-school graduation rates and it’s hurting Tennessee’s students, education officials say.

“There is no question that having an accurate measure of student success is vitally important for every high school in America,” said Dan Challener, president of the Public Education Foundation, “and we’ve never been clear.”

But everything will be squared up by next year, officials promise, and not just because the federal government is trying to make them.

There’s widespread confusion over the way Tennessee and the rest of the country calculate high school graduation rates. But officials with the state Department of Education say by 2009 they will have an accurate and nationally comparable count of high school graduates in the Volunteer State.

Until all states are “comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges,” no one will grasp the gravity of a national graduation crisis, where one-fourth of high school students never earn a diploma, said Mr. Challener, who has studied state and local graduation rates through the foundation’s work with high school reform efforts in Hamilton County.

Using 2004 numbers, Tennessee says it graduates 75.7 percent of its high school students. No, says the U.S. Department of Education, it’s actually 66.1 percent. Although the figures are four years old, 2004 is the most recent year that the Department of Education used to calculate its figures.

Other states have reported different — and usually higher — graduation rates than the federal government. Because school systems that don’t reach federal guidelines under No Child Left Behind can face penalties up to state takeover, states are being accused of artificially inflating their graduation numbers to meet those standards. In turn, Tennessee says federal figures don’t take into consideration such factors as students who have not dropped out but transferred out of the system or started homeschooling

Discrepancies expected

Because federal data didn’t take into account such students, the U.S. Department of Education said there would be fairly wide discrepancies between its numbers and the states’, said Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education.

“They told us we should expect a 10 percentage-point discrepancy give or take between what they report and what we report,” she said.

Either way, both of Tennessee’s numbers are a healthy distance from its set goal of graduating 90 percent by 2014, one of the most ambitious in the country.

To clear up the confusion nationwide, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently announced that, as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, all states must move toward a single method of calculating high school graduation rates.

Mr. Challener said consistency in measuring graduation rates is critical.

“I believe you can’t solve a problem until you understand it and have a good measure of it,” he said.

Step ahead

In the move to standardize calculations, Tennessee already may be a step ahead of the game, state education officials say. Two years ago, the state began moving toward a 2009 implementation of the calculation method endorsed by the National Governor’s Association.

Louisiana, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Texas are using a similar method, and a handful of other states are gathering student data needed to use the same plan.

Although Elaine Quesinberry, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, would not confirm the specific method Ms. Spellings would request, Tennessee education officials think it is likely the governor’s association method will become the national standard.

Ms. Quesinberry said an announcement about the new method would come soon on the Federal Register, the Washington, D.C.-based daily publication that lists federal rules, proposed rules and notices.

Like all states across the country, Tennessee was charged with determining its own graduation rate calculation after the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in 2001. The result was a confusing patchwork of statistics from across the country, with no accurate way to compare states with each other.

U.S. Department of Education officials insist their recent graduation figures shouldn’t be used as the be-all end-all, but merely are an estimate that states can use to compare themselves with other states.

“The (calculation) provides a standard estimate of the on-time high school graduation rate,” David Thomas, spokesman at the U.S. Department of Education, said. “The numbers are used for statistical purposes such as estimating the national on-time graduation rate or examining changes in graduation rates over time.”