This morning's Ithaca Journal has an article on high school dropout rates that oddly doesn't list the Dryden school district's rate, but does say that "Dryden superintendent Mark Crawford was not available for comment". Perhaps they didn't want to print a number without a story?
The links to the PDFs on the story page lead to a 15% dropout rate for Dryden. Groton is at 17%, Newfield at 23% (though that's contested), Ithaca at 4%, Trumansburg at 3%, and Lansing at 2%.
On the opinion page, Murray Cohen of Dryden supports Hilary Clinton for President, saying that Barack Obama "is more inimical to the Democratic cause than Ralph Nader was in 2000."
Posted by simon at April 26, 2007 5:16 PM in Ithaca Journal , politics (national) , schools (Dryden)
What they talk about as "dropout rates" are really not that. They are "four-year graduation rates." They include kids who are held back and don't graduate with their cohort, kids who accelerate and graduate in three years, kids in GED programs, etc. Your state ed dep't at work.
Paul points out that the schools with the lowest rates all use one particular kind of data mining software. The ones with the highest rates use software that allows the state to mine the data without the school's interference. He finds this suspicious, and so should we all. If you look at the table with ICSD rates of graduation, the number is 78%, yet they report their dropout rate as 4%. It's an apples-and-oranges situation, and bad reporting, too.
Wow - that's much more screwed up than I imagined possible.
I knew that it wasn't an easy calculation, but people who graduate in three years increase the 'dropout rate'? And gaming the system seems extra-awful.