Houston isn't alone when it comes to dropouts

THE Houston Independent School District dropout scandal, in which HISD was caught drastically understating its high school dropout rate, has drawn a lot of attention to the problem of dropouts. Unfortunately, the problem of inaccurate reporting of dropout rates, far from being confined to Houston, is a nationwide problem with major implications for the public perception of our high school system.

For example, the Texas Department of Education gets away with claiming a statewide high school dropout rate that isn’t much more believable than the one Houston reported. The state claims that only 1 percent of students drop out of high school each year, but this just isn’t a realistic figure. Using publicly available enrollment figures, we estimate that Texas’ high school graduation rate is only 67 percent.

The state can get away with publishing an unrealistic dropout rate because its impossible for anyone to check its calculations directly. The state is supposed to track individual students to see who graduates, who moves out of state and who drops out. But because student records are confidential, nobody can check to see whether the state does a good (or even adequate) job of fulfilling this responsibility.

There are plenty of reasons why Texas, like many other states, would drastically understate the percentage of high school students that drop out. For one thing, keeping track of individual students just isn’t the kind of job that the school system is designed to do well. For another, the system is under a lot of political pressure to reduce estimates of the percentage of students who drop out.

Tracking individuals as they move from place to place and change their life arrangements is maddeningly difficult even for the people who run the U.S. Census, and that’s pretty much all they do. For a school, whose staff is busy with the job of educating students, the job is all the more frustrating.

This problem is compounded by the perverse political incentives under which the system operates. When the state claims that very few kids drop out of school, the voters and taxpayers who support the system are happy. On the other hand, every time the state identifies a student as a dropout, that’s one more piece of bad news for the system.

Small wonder, then, that schools seem to go out of their way not to count students as dropouts. If schools don’t have any information on whether a student left the system because he moved or because he dropped out, they have little incentive to find out. It’s much better for them just to eliminate that student from their calculations, or include him under a heading such as unknown. Students who get a GED or say they intend to get a GED are often counted as high school graduates.

In contrast to these murky procedures, we use a simple method to estimate graduation rates based on publicly available enrollment data. We start with the number of students enrolled in ninth grade, making an adjustment to account for the presence of students repeating ninth grade. Then we look at changes in the total high school student population over the following four years, and use this information to calculate how many students from our entering ninth-grade class should have graduated four years later if none had dropped out.

By comparing this figure to the actual number of high school diplomas handed out in that year, we produce a reliable estimate of the graduation rate. While Texas’ official dropout rate of 1 percent per year is based on an unreliable method that outside observers can’t double-check, our estimated graduation rate of 67 percent is a simple calculation based on figures that anyone with a computer can access.

Inaccurate high school graduation and dropout rates are a nationwide problem. Many states publish official graduation rates that are nowhere near the figures our method produces. Even the National Center for Education Statistics, a generally reliable source of education data run by the U.S. Department of Education, claims that the national graduation rate is 86.5 percent. In a new study sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we estimate it at only 70 percent.

Texas education officials should wake up and smell the dropouts. How can voters make informed decisions about education policy if Texas makes claims that are so far out of touch with reality?