Measure twice, cut once. That’s an old carpenter’s slogan. It means, before you tackle a problem or a project, you should first take its measure. The U.S. Department of Education has learned a similar lesson: Before you can stop children from being left behind, it helps to know how many left-behind children there are.
For years, federal education officials have been working to reduce high school dropout rates without quite knowing what the dropout rate is. The problem is that every state and many school districts have their own way of defining and counting who has graduated and who has dropped out.
Illinois, for example, counts students who enter in the 9th grade, but not those who drop out in 8th grade. It also misses counting students who claim to be transferring out of one high school but never show up at another.
New Mexico, by contrast, has been basing its graduation rate only on how many of the seniors who started the 12th grade in September received a diploma at the end of the school year, leaving out students who dropped out during the 9th, 10th or 11th grade. Some states counted as dropouts only students who filled out the necessary paperwork to officially withdraw from school.
The dizzying 50-state array of counting methods would be amusing if it did not have such serious consequences. In an economy that increasingly calls for workers who have diplomas, dropouts are far more likely to be jobless, single parents, drug offenders, law breakers and prison inmates.
That’s why high school graduation rates are a key component in determining whether schools are making progress each year under the No Child Left Behind Act. A lack of consistency from state to state in counting who graduated and who didn’t makes it hard to compare results — and easier for each state to undercount its dropouts.
The size of the dropout crisis has been a matter of hot dispute among education experts. The Education Department likes to note that 88 percent of young Americans earn a high school diploma or its equivalent by age 24. But a survey of existing data co-written by James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist, points out that as few as 66 percent are graduating on time — and only about 50 percent of blacks and Latinos.
Help is on the way. In its last big push on the education front, the Bush administration offers a sensible remedy: Require all states to use the same counting formula.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced in late April that she is implementing that change. Her new rules also will require schools to break down their tallies by race, gender and income. States will be pushed to make sure low-income and minority students graduate from high school at the same rate as their white and more affluent counterparts. If schools don’t meet those goals for each of the targeted groups within two years, they could face sanctions that include letting parents transfer students to better-performing schools of their choice.
The changes don’t require congressional action, which is just as well in an election year in which little legislation of great consequence will see daylight. The states will have up until 2013 to meet the new reporting standards. That leaves only one year before the target date by which No Child Left Behind is supposed to have all public school students proficient in reading and math.
School improvement requires an accurate — and uniformly gathered — count of who is graduating and who isn’t. Counting students who have been left behind is the first step in helping them to catch up.
