November 10, 2005 | By Walter Haney |

According to the U.S. Department of Education, New York is now one of the worst states in the country for students to get a public education. Based on data in a newly released report by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES), the high school graduation rate in New York is among the nation's lowest, just slightly better than South Carolina. While the new NCES report, The Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate for Public High Schools has received little public attention, its findings are instructive but particularly disturbing for the Empire State. Before summarizing the bad news from the NCES report, it's important to understand why a state's graduation rate represents such an important measure of school quality.

In 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act required states to report on school systems' quality in terms of both test results and high school graduation rates. Test results, however, can never cover all the broad goals of public education - academic, social, and vocational.

Graduation rate is a more comprehensive measure for the simple reason that it encompasses a host of factors affecting student progress including performance in courses, attendance, and citizenship, together with scores on standardized tests. So why hasn't this robust and useful index of school quality been receiving more attention?

There are at least three reasons. First in implementing the NCLB Act, the Department of Education allows states considerable leeway in reporting their own graduation rates, making comparisons difficult. Second, some state school officials prefer delay, claiming it will be impossible to calculate accurate graduation rates until they have in place systems to track students from before they enter high school until they have had as long as six years to complete high school. Waiting for tracking systems means officials can pass the buck until well after they leave office.

Additionally, different researchers have offered a half dozen different ways of calculating graduation rates. Some attempt to tweak results by adjusting for migration, mortality, home-schooling, and other circumstances. Such factors can affect graduation rate calculations in some places. But research conducted by the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy (CSTEEP) at Boston College has shown that for most states and large school systems these factors have little impact on results.

Third, several states have chosen to lie. One common ploy is to report "graduation rate" as the number of graduates divided by the number of students in grade 12, ignoring the fact that many students drop out of school long before they reach the twelfth grade. As Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, put it, "We've got to end this rampant dishonesty about graduation rates."

The most obvious way to calculate graduation rate is simply to divide the number of graduates in a particular year by the number enrolled in grade 9 four years earlier. Though this measure used to be reported by NCES, one problem with this approach is that results can be biased downward because of the number of students flunked to repeat grade 9. Our research has shown , that nationally over the last 30 years the rate at which students are held back to repeat grade 9 has tripled, from around 4% to 12%.

The new NCES report gets around this problem - sometimes called the grade 9 "bulge" - by using "averaged freshman enrollment." Instead of using just grade nine enrollment, NCES uses the average of grade 9 enrollment, grade 8 enrollment in the previous year and grade 10 the subsequent year.

Using this methodology, the new report reveals that New York now has one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation. For the high school classes of 2002 and 2003, New York's graduation rate was a mere 61% in both years- meaning that forty percent of students who started high school in New York failed to graduate. The only states with comparably low graduation rates were South Carolina (58% and 60%), Georgia (61% in both years) and Mississippi (61 and 63%). In contrast, graduation rates for New Jersey (86% and 87%) and Connecticut (80% and 81%) were twenty points better. Even southern states with historically weak systems of public education and low graduation rates, showed better results than New York - Arkansas 75% and 77%, Florida 63% and 67%, Kentucky 70% and 72%, Louisiana 64% in both years, North Carolina 68% and 70%, and Texas 74% and 75%.

Why are graduation rates in New York so abysmally low? And what are the responsible public officials doing to improve graduation rates in the state? Parents and citizens deserve answers to these questions.

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Walter Haney is a professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and director of the Ford Foundation funded Education Pipeline project in the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Public Policy at Boston College.