Americans should be deeply alarmed by new data showing that the country is continuing to lose ground educationally to its competitors abroad.
The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.
Most American parents never see these damning international comparisons, which are based on census figures and labor force statistics. Instead, parents who want to know how their schools are doing in terms of vital statistics like graduation rates must rely on phony calculations cooked up by state governments that are determined to hide the truth for as long as possible.
With these problems clearly in mind, Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, has issued new regulations for how school graduation rates are calculated and reported to the public under the No Child Left Behind Act. States will now be required to keep track of students from when they enter high school until they receive regular diplomas, counting as non-graduates any students who choose to leave school before that time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/opinion/30thu2.html?th&emc=th