The Educated Reporter: Answering your graduation rate questions—sort of.

The Educated Reporter: Answering your graduation rate questions—sort of.

Answering your graduation rate questions—sort of.

by Linda Perlstein

I am frequently asked what the U.S. dropout rate is. That’s like asking how you make chocolate ice cream; there are so many possible methods and outcomes. It is easy for me to make recommendations when it comes to ice cream: Alton Brown if you have a lot of time or David Lebovitz if you don’t. Graduation rates, however, are more complicated.

Today NCES released its most recent calculations of graduation and dropout data, taken from the Common Core of Data. The dropout rate—the percentage of students enrolled in 2006-07 who were not enrolled in 2007-08 and had not completed school—was 4 percent. The average freshman on-time graduation rate—the percentage of high school students who entered ninth grade in 2004 and graduated in 2008—was 75 percent, up from 74 percent the previous year. Keep in mind that this doesn’t count the real people who entered school and graduated. It just compares the total number of students at the start to the number at the finish line. If 100,000 students drop out sophomore year and 100,000 exchange students from Belgium arrive junior year and get