Report: Graduation rates lower than reported in state
By Chris Gosier, The Advocate, June 16, 2007

Connecticut's high school graduation rates overstate the percentage of students who get diplomas, a new report says.

The report by ConnCAN, a nonprofit advocacy group, gives new graduation rates purporting to show how likely students are to finish high school in four years.

The report says Stamford's rate was 77 percent in 2004, compared to 90 percent reported by the state, and Norwalk's rate was 70 percent vs. the state figure of 88 percent, according to the May 30 report.

ConnCAN, which released the report to bring new focus to graduation rates, said finishing high school is a key indicator of a student's success in life. Current rates fail to reflect the true number of students that finish school, ConnCAN spokesman Marc Porter Magee said.

"I think if people knew it was so low, we'd probably be approaching the problem with a lot more urgency," he said.

But critics seized on caveats in the report, such as the lack of distinction between students who drop out and those who leave a school district to attend private schools.

"The methodology ignores a number of real-world circumstances, real-life circumstances, that happen in our school districts," said Tom Murphy, spokesman for the state Department of Education.

ConnCAN used numbers provided by Education Week, a national publication that compiled a report on high school graduation rates across the country.

The report comes as graduation rates are getting more attention nationally, with states trying to come up with a common method of calculating them.

Connecticut is setting up a new system to track students' whereabouts and get better data on who's dropping out and who's going to another school district, Murphy said. The state began collecting data for the new system in 2005 by assigning unique numbers to each student and expects to have all students in the system by 2010. The system will catch students who take five or six years to finish, another state official said.

For now, the state gets the graduation rate for a given year by calculating the number of dropouts in that graduating class for the previous four years.

Magee faulted that method, saying districts' definition of a dropout is too narrow. The system fails to count many students who leave school, including those who go to adult education programs that don't give students the same push toward graduating, he said.

"It's almost like you have to declare dropping out of school" to be counted in the statistics, Magee said.

ConnCAN also takes a different approach by calculating the likelihood that students will graduate. The study's graduation rates come from calculating how many students moved up a grade in a given year, reflecting how likely it is that that year's ninth-graders would eventually receive a four-year diploma.

Magee said it gives a more immediate picture of the conditions at a high school.

"It tends to get you closer to what's actually happening to students within a high school than what we've seen from the traditional statistics," he said. He said it better reflects the students who enter and leave a school each year.

Stamford school board President Martin Levine criticized the report, saying, "I just don't see that that's more relevant than actually looking at it over four years."

"They're making something much more complex than it needs to be, and I don't see the point of that," he said.

Levine also criticized the report for counting students as dropouts when they transfer to other schools and for excluding high school equivalency diplomas in its figures.

"They're not dropouts, but they're calling them dropouts, even though they're not," he said. "The logic in the statistics are flawed. Seriously flawed."

Magee responded that high schools generally receive more transfer students from private schools than they lose to them. He said ConnCAN focused on four-year diplomas because students are less likely to get diplomas in adult education programs.

"Kids kind of get into this loop where they're not graduating, but they're not technically dropping out," he said.

A call to the Norwalk superintendent's office was not returned.