Way to compete, America, with the rest of the world! Um, we are still trying to compete, right?
States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
One team of statisticians working at the [Mississippi] state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.
The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.
[…]
Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.
[…]
The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.The No Child law is also at fault.
For those who don’t want to use a fake email address to log into the NYT article, here’s a shortened version of it. And here’s what Kentucky is doing about part of the problem.
#29, bobbo, and I’m completely with you. Exactly as you said.
Innumeracy hurts us all. $200,000 is not enough of an allocation for studying the pollination of California’s #1 horticultural export.
K to 12 Public education in the U.S. is extremely boring, dumb, way too easy. Very few students are challenged to excel while the majority are left to be bored in a c rated classroom and some eventually quit. I know this because I came from another country while in the tenth grade where all students were in pre-cal, no excuses or track systems. As a student here I got all A’s without even going to school most of the time, only went to school to take dumb tests. Guess what? I became a teacher because I wanted to make a difference. I hope I did for my students. As a parent each school day I made a point to let my children know they were to respect their teacher and to remember to learn in and out of school. I know all children can learn. They need to believe in themselves and we need to believe in them. Most Teachers work hard. I see three main problems in the educational system; One the curriculum , two the low expectations of students and their bad behavior in the classroom as a consequence of the system failing them. Three education is for learning not for a job in other words, education is like a spectrum of light ongoing and expanding throughout our lives, it is not meant to end.