More on graduation rates

Last week Guestblogger Colvin covered Ed Trust’s report on states’ suspect reporting of graduation rates. Fallout and commentary continues. Jay Mathews responds here. Finn in this week’s Gadfly here. The Empire, in the form of the Council of Chief State School Officers, strikes back here, calling for better longitudinal systems to track individual students over time. The chiefs have a point – the methods Ed Trust and others are using to estimate graduation rates are a vast improvement over many bogus state estimates, but they’re far from perfect. In the meantime, though, there’s little doubt we’ve got a real dropout crisis on our hands.

— Guestblogger Bryan Hassel, Public Impact