High School Graduation Rates:Alternative Methods and Implications

Abstract

The No Child Left Behind Act has brought great attention to the high school graduation rate as one of the mandatory accountability measures for public school systems. However, there is no consensus on how to calculate the high school graduation rate given the lack of longitudinal databases that track individual students. This study reviews literature on and practices in reporting high school graduation rates, compares graduation rate estimates yielded from alternative methods, and estimates discrepancies between alternative results at national, state, and state ethnic group levels. Despite the graduation rate method used, results indicate that high school graduation rates in the U.S. have been declining in recent years and that graduation rates for black and Hispanic students lag substantially behind those of white students. As to graduation rate method preferred, this study found no evidence that the conceptually more complex methods yield more accurate or valid graduation rate estimates than the simpler methods.

The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels

“…In agreement with the earlier findings of Cameron and Heckman (1993), some scholars find that high school graduation rates peaked in the late 1960s and have since stagnated or fallen (See Chaplin [2002] and Miao and Haney [2004]). …”

“…For the first time, alternative credentials, such as General Educational Development (GED) certificates and certificates of attendance, were to be explicitly excluded from state and local graduation calculations (United States Congress [2001]). 5 Using the new definition of who is a high school graduate, many scholars claim that the United States has a dropout crisis (See Greene [2001], Swanson [2004], Swanson and Chaplin [2003], Miao and Haney [2004] and Warren [2005]). The new school of thought is that the true graduation rate is substantially lower than the rate that had been reported for years by the NCES and other governmental agencies.…”

“…36 To avoid this problem, we use the previous year's eighth-grade enrollments to proxy for the entering ninth-grade class. This estimator-also used by Miao and Haney (2004) Education also issue state-endorsed regular high school diplomas that are not counted in the CCDschool-based data. The number of diplomas issued by these programs is relatively small overall since GED certification is the primary focus.…”

“…However, contrary to the status completion rate, the graduation ratio estimates peak at 77 percent in 1969 and then slowly declined until suddenly reversing the long-time trend starting in 2002. 3 A number of recent studies question the validity of the status completion rate and attempt to develop more accurate estimators of high school graduation rates (See Greene [2001], Swanson [2004], Swanson and Chaplin [2003], Miao and Haney [2004] and Warren [2005]). Heated debates about the levels and trends in the true high school graduation rate have appeared in the popular press.…”

Educating Higher Education and School Leaders in Matters of Peace

“…Campbell (2003) posits that the number of students graduating from inner city high schools is about equal to the number of students dropping out of these schools. In fact, many scholars claim that the United States has a dropout crisis (Greene, 2002;Swanson, 2004;Swanson & Chaplin, 2003;Miao and Haney, 2004;Warren, 2005). The new school of thought is that the true graduation rate is substantially lower than the rate that had been reported for years by the National Center for Education Statistics and other governmental agencies (National Center for Education Statistics, 2007).…”