February 26, 2004 | By Greg Winter | New York Times

Black and Latino students in New York State are less likely to finish high school on time than their counterparts anywhere else in the nation, according to a new analysis of graduation rates around the country.

Less than a third of Latino students in New York earned a high school diploma in four years, the worst showing of any state, compared with more than half of all Latino students in the nation as a whole.

Only 35 percent of black students in New York graduated on time, also the worst showing of any state, while slightly more than half of black students graduated on time nationally.

New York's Asian students did considerably better, with about 6 out of 10 graduating on time, but that, too, still fell far shy of the national average of 77 percent for Asian students, the study found. It was conducted by researchers at Harvard University and the Urban Institute.

Only among white students did New York mirror the national average, with about three-quarters of students finishing on time in both cases. Even among white students, however, the researchers considered graduation rates to be startlingly low.

"It's frightening," said Christopher Edley, the co-director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, who will become dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, in July. "With graduation rates this low, one has to worry about the long-term growth and wealth of the nation."

In terms of overall graduation rates, New Jersey ranked first, with 86 percent of students finishing on time. Connecticut ranked 12th, with 77 percent of students finishing in four years, and New York State 43rd, with 61.4 percent graduating on time.

Part of the reason New York ranked so poorly was the dismal performance of the New York City school system, whose 1.1 million students account for more than a third of the state's schoolchildren, the authors said. The study found that 38 percent of students graduate in four years in New York City. Among the 100 largest school districts in the nation, only four cities - Cleveland; Cincinnati; Columbus, Ohio; and Oakland, Calif. - had a worse record of students graduating on time in 2001, the latest year for which data was available, the report found.

Why New York City's schools did so poorly was not the focus of the report, but researchers said that its very size and its high concentrations of poor students were major disadvantages. Racial isolation and the prevalence of non-English speakers in the city schools compound those problems, the researchers said.

After reviewing the analysis, officials at the New York State Department of Education expressed skepticism, given that their records show the overall graduation rate for the city was about 50 percent, almost a dozen percentage points higher than the report found. But that aside, they said the concern was warranted.

"All the data show both the level of student achievement and the graduation rate have been much too low for a long time in New York and the nation,'' said Alan Ray, a spokesman for the department. He added: "We need to direct still more funds to the neediest children.''

Educational researchers have long complained that government statistics grossly underestimate the number of dropouts every year. Students who leave school without notifying administrators, or who enroll in equivalency diploma programs, are often not counted as dropouts, though they do not end up finishing high school, researchers contend.

Much of the statistical analysis was conducted by Christopher B. Swanson, a research associate at the Urban Institute, which describes itself as a nonpartisan research group. Some researchers have criticized his methodology, while others have called his data much more reliable than that of government sources.

One of the harsher evaluations of Mr. Swanson's work came from John Robert Warren, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, who has done his own ranking of states by graduation rate. By his calculations, New York ranks about 38th, not last, though the actual figures differ from Mr. Swanson's by only a few percentage points.

"In an extreme case, he might be 5 or more percentage points off,'' Mr. Warren said. "We're not talking about being off by 10 percentage points or anything, but accuracy is accuracy.''

Mr. Swanson defended his work, saying, "No method's perfect, but this gives us the best data available today.''