Dropout rates raising concerns

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006 | 12:34 p.m.

If the Council for a Better Nevada hopes to work closely with the Clark County School District to improve public education, the two sides will first have to agree on a common vocabulary.

The council, a coalition of Nevada business executives pushing a school reform agenda, says the district graduates just 40 percent of its high school students. The rest leave at some point between their freshman and senior years.

"That's outrageous," said Jim Rogers, university chancellor and a member of the council. "There is something terribly wrong in their methodology for educating kids."

Not so, school administrators say. Clark County's graduation rate was 63 percent in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available. That figure is calculated by the Nevada Education Department in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"All we can do is go to the official records for which there are prescribed criteria in the way we report" graduation statistics," said Walt Rulffes, interim superintendent of the Clark County School District.

Maureen Peckman, Council for a Better Nevada director, said her group determined the 40 percent graduation rate after a conversation with Rulffes in which he said the district starts out with 24,000 freshman but graduates only 10,000 seniors.

Rulffes said he recalls the conversation but believes he indicated that the district typically has 24,000 eighth graders and graduates just 10,000 seniors. The numbers were not intended as hard data, but rather as an illustration of the challenges the district is facing, Rulffes said.

While Rogers and Peckman may have misunderstood his comments, that doesn't take away from the underlying truth, Rulffes said. Regardless of how the graduation rate is calculated, Clark County's performance isn't satisfactory, he said.

"We need to recognize there is a profound problem that needs to be addressed - we have too many students dropping out," Rulffes said. "We don't know what happens to those 12,000 kids. Do they get jobs? Go to other school districts? Migrate out of the area? There's a complete array of reasons and we need the answers."

Rulffes said he had guidance counselors conduct an informal poll of students who recently left the district.

"The two biggest reasons we got (for students dropping out) was that they had failed the proficiency test or they were behind in their credits and figured they weren't going to graduate anyway," Rulffes said. "We need to reach those kids who are discouraged when they're still our students, before they give up and we lose them for good."

To that end, Rulffes said he will turn to state Sen. Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas, who has offered to help the district tackle its dropout problem.

Keith Rheault, Nevada's superintendent of public instruction, said graduation rates are determined by following a group of individual ninth graders and determining how many of them have graduated four years later. That formula follows the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, he said.

The formula hurts fast-growing districts such as Clark County, where 40 percent of students move between schools or out of the district each year.

The district tries to track all students who leave, but some provide no contact information or forwarding addresses. In January, for example, the district's high schools had 322 students withdraw to attend schools in other states, 50 students request their records be forwarded to charter or private schools, 49 students who said they were leaving the country and 23 students who moved to another Nevada county.

If students disappear from the original group of ninth graders, they are not replaced in the graduation rate calculation by students who transfer into the class, Rheault said.

"I would tend to side with the School District's saying the group's (the Council for a Better Nevada's) calculation isn't a fair representation of what the true graduation rate is," he said.

When it comes to calculating graduation rates, formulas vary from state to state as well as between the federal recommendation and the methods used by think tanks and watch dog groups.

"It shouldn't be a race to the moon," said Kathy Christie, vice president of the Education Commission of the States, a clearinghouse for statistics and research. "This shouldn't be about one state being compared to another, but we all know that's what happens. And that gives states incentives to tweak their formulas so that they look better."

In June, the National Governors Association agreed to create one standard system for reporting graduation rates nationwide. Rheault said Nevada already adhered to nearly all of the standards laid down by the association. The one exception was that Nevada had counted adjusted diplomas for special education students in its graduation totals, Rheault said. Those diplomas will no longer be added to the tally.

Emily Richmond can be reached at 259-8829 or at [email protected].