By Abbe Smith

For years, the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now has released annual reports showing a disparity between graduation rates reported by the state and by a national education research group.

The difference with this year’s report is that ConnCAN is predicting the disparity may disappear in a few years.

The state Department of Education’s high school graduation rates are typically higher than rates reported by Education Week’s Diploma Project. ConnCAN’s report released this month shows a 44.7 percentage disparity between the two reporting entities for 2007, the most recent year for which comparison data is available.

However, the state has announced it is changing its system for calculating graduation rates, a move supported by New Haven school board member and Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now Executive Director Alex Johnston.

“The reason it is important is we have to have an accurate baseline for understanding improvement moving forward,” Johnston said.

Earlier this year, the state restated its high school graduation rate for 2009 based on new calculating methods that align with new reform efforts. In March, the state Department of Education released new data that showed 79.3 percent of the class of 2009 graduated high school within four years, compared to previous reports that had indicated a state graduation rate of 92 percent.

“The new data show that the graduation rates in the state are worse than reported in previous years. For black and Hispanic students, the rates are alarming. We must act now to do more,” Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan said in a statement released in March with the new data.

The restatement of the graduation rate was calculated using a new method that tracks individual students as they move through the education system, and more accurately shows how many students completed high school within four years.

The state is about to implement a new system for tracking graduation rates that follows that method. In the past, the state has included in its calculations a combination of annual dropout data and self-reported graduate data. For example, if there are 100 students in the senior class and 95 students graduate, the graduation rate would be 95 percent. But that does not take into account how many students from the original freshman class dropped out along the way, or how many seniors were in their fifth year of high school.

For New Haven Public Schools in 2007, the state reported a graduation rate of 78.5 percent, compared to a 52 percent graduation rate reported by Education Week.

New Haven Superintendent of Schools Reginald Mayo said the difference is simply a matter of different formulas used to calculate graduation rates.

“This has been a bone of contention for quite some time,” Mayo said, adding: “The federal government was trying to get some consistency across the board, which we welcome.”

Catherine McCaslin, director of research, assessment and student information for New Haven, said the district simply sends its data to the state, and the state calculates the rate.

McCaslin said the district supports any formula “as long as it’s consistent and consistently applied across all districts.”