Could it be true that South Carolina at last has begun its slow climb up from the bottom of the states with its on-time graduation rates? So says a new Education Week study that will be featured in Thursday's P & C. Actually, what the calculations of the study show is that South Carolina improved from a 54 percent graduation rate to a 55 percent rate.
Think of it: we beat out Nevada, New Mexico, and Louisiana! What losers they! We only lost 158 students from this year's graduating class every day of the last four school years.
Don't you wonder what percentage of those dropped out of CCSD high schools? Don't you wonder what the on-time graduation rate for CCSD is? Well, that's a secret that is guaranteed to remain right up there with what ever happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
Oh, CCSD keeps records all right, but whatever they report needs to be adjusted for the fudge factor. You see, for the same year that the study calculated a 55 percent rate, South Carolina REPORTED a 77 percent graduation rate. One could argue that some students take more than four years to graduate, but that would hardly begin to explain the 22 percent wishful-thinking discrepancy.
Time to get real.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
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1 comment:
Is this just about numbers and report cards for public officials and school administrators? It should be about educating people who will be part of the community for a lot longer than just the 4 years they are supposed to be in high school. How many kids are written off by school experts before they even start school because statistics and the numbers "say" these kids will fail? If these numbers say anything, it's that school experts are a major part of this problem and it starts long before these kids drop out.
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