Va. graduation rates in dispute
Published: June 10, 2009
Virginia officials are disputing a report that says the state's high school graduation rate dropped over a 10-year period.
The report by the publisher of Education Week says Virginia had a 73.4 percent graduation rate in 1996, compared with 69.2 percent in 2006. The statistics used by Editorial Projects in Education were the latest available to compare states.
Nationally, graduation rates rose 2.8 percent to 69.2 percent.
Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said the estimates are flawed because they don't account for student mobility or ninth-grade retention.
The state's own available statistics show graduation rates went from 74.3 percent in 1998 to 73.8 percent in 2006. Starting in 2008, Virginia bases its calculations from ninth grade to graduation.
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Reader Reactions
Good point Dave….In Chesterfield it costs over $11,000.00 to educate a child each year, and our graduation rates are an embarrasement. This just shows us again that the amount of money being spent on education, and the quality of that education have almost nothing to do with eachother. This country needs to get back to the basics of education, and stop listening to the administrative idiots, with their masters and PhD’s, that have no concept of REAL education.
What about the 30-odd% who don’t graduate? What has all the money in public education done to prepare them to go out and become productive citizens? How does the DOE plan to square even their best-case numbers with the requirements of NCLB? Most important of all, when will we stop obsessing over numbers and start caring about the warm bodies behind them? We’re failing to graduate one out of every four students and that is a tragedy.
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