Counting dropouts uniformly

South Carolina, like many other states, suffers from high dropout and low graduation rates. But state-by-state comparisons of those statistics also have long suffered from the lack of a uniform system for measuring them. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is wisely moving to lift the cloud obscuring valid assessments of those rates.

Secretary Spellings, during a "Dropout Prevention Summit" in Washington on Tuesday, announced that new federal regulations will require states to adopt a national formula to calculate graduation and dropout percentages, eliminating the current confusion produced by widely divergent means of determining those numbers. That's welcome news for educators trying to get a firm handle on this crucial issue.

S.C. Education Department spokesman Jim Foster tells us that the federal No Child Left Behind law produced "national standards that really weren't national standards at all" in a number of categories, including graduation rates. As he put it: "It's a comparability problem but it's also a credibility problem. We're constantly getting hit with 'the states are misleading people,' but that's certainly not our intention."

Mr. Foster said South Carolina is already advancing its ability to track students' progress with a new "Unique Student Identifier" system. He added that S.C. Education Superintendent Jim Rex has stressed the need to account for not just students who graduate from a high school four years after entering the ninth grade, but those who take longer to graduate and those who earn high school equivalency diplomas.

Though the details of the new federal standards for calculating graduation and dropout rates haven't been released, they likely will draw criticism from some educational experts. But they should at least create a much more even baseline on a long-term serious issue.

For instance, Ms. Spellings, during Tuesday's conference, cited a troubling new report from the America's Promise Alliance showing that in 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities, graduation rates were lower than 50 percent. Our recent local and state graduation rates haven't been much better than 50 percent, either.

Even factoring in fluctuations due to the varied means of measurement, those are alarming figures. Consider the long-range consequences, both individually and collectively, if roughly half of the children in a community don't attain the minimum level of modern education represented by a high school degree.

That report also found that 1.2 million U.S. students quit high school annually. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell, founding chair of the alliance, said Tuesday: "When more than one million students a year drop out of high school, it's more than a problem, it's a catastrophe."

Correctly gauging the scope of that "catastrophe" is a necessary step toward countering it — and toward enhancing our nation's future.