Gary Rubinstein is quite the sleuth when anyone makes a claim about educational results that seem too good to be true.
A few years ago, he helped me pin down some whoppers when Secretary Arne Duncan, President Obama, and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed they discovered miracle schools that had a 100% graduation rate, or miraculous score gains, or some other incredible statistic. His research helped me write an article for the New York Times about miracle schools, debunking the notion that anyone can overcome poverty if they do something simple, like firing the entire staff or, better yet, raise their expectations.
Gary created a website to report and analyze sitings of miracle schools, whose magic melted on closer inspection. The purpose was not to say that schools could not get better, but that improving schools is hard work. not subject to the magic of press releases and political manipulation.
After the appearance of that article, the miracle claims briefly subsided, but Gary found that Duncan recently tweeted about a high school in Colorado with a 100% graduation rate.
He checked it out, and discovered yet again that this was not a miracle school. It was true that 100% of the seniors graduated, but only 62% of the ninth grade cohort made it to graduation.
As Arne loves to say, we should stop lying to our children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Most official statistics on education or almost anything else are garbage.
Yes. We have a charter high school in Detroit that makes the same claim. With the same attrition rate or higher. It all depends on how one massages the numbers.
Interestingly, Denver’s flagship PUBLIC high school, East High School, has a higher graduation rate, according to the district’s own calculations, than this Stapleton school. 92% to 87%. And where do some of the missing 55 students (144 – 89) end up? East High School. Finally, this Stapleton school is, you guessed it, a charter school.
Anyone else remember the early days of NCLB and the 90, 90 90 miracle schools we were so often told about?
90% low income, 90% minority 90% pass state mandated tests.
Yep, these schools were “proving poverty didn’t matter” and “the soft bigotry of low expectations had taken hold”.
I kept offering to pay my own way to go visit one that actually mirrored our population and situation, but somehow the miracle was never available for viewing first hand.
Doing a little math—but not by using the methods tested via the Common Core—reveals that 38% of the students who entered as freshman did not graduate. Where did they go? What happened to them?
Even public schools manipulate the numbers by cherry picking facts to look better. What they report are not lies but they don’t paint a complete picture either. But they do mislead.
For instance, I just checked several on-line school report cards for the high school where I taught for the last 16 years of the thirty I was a classroom teacher.
For 2011-12:
Grade 9 had 545 students
Grade 10 had 631
Grade 11 had 581
Grade 12 had 502
When graduation rates are announced, they will work only from the 12th grade list and never mention how many from that graduating class started as 9th graders. That’s how they did it when I was teaching there.
Click to access 2012%20Nogales%20High%20School%20Accountability%20Report%20Card.pdf
But then I Googled the same public high school’s report card for the 2008-09 school year—because they are still on-line. Duh!
Grade 9 had 659 students but four years later only 502 were seniors. I wondered how many of those 2012 seniors graduated?
Grade 10 had 571
Grade 11 had 581
Grade 12 had 527
Click to access 2008-09%20English%20SARC_Nogales%20HS.pdf
Back to the 2011-12 school year and the earliest graduation rate listed on the school report card was for the previous year 2010-11 and that rate was listed as 84.44% for 438 students. The seniors for that year started as 9th graders in 07-08 when there were 659 in grade 9.
How did 438 who gradated four years later become an 84.44% graduation rate when that class started four years earlier with 659 students? The actual graduation rate for that class was 66.46% but only if we count the total 9th grade class.
As you can see, even the public schools manipulate the numbers by cherry picking what they report and they aren’t telling lies.
Click to access 2008-09%20English%20SARC_Nogales%20HS.pdf
Then I had another idea and Googled how many graduated in 2012 and found the answer was 449 for 2012 compared to the 659 who started in 08-09.
http://www.insidesocal.com/classnotes/2012/06/11/nogales-high-graduates-449-sen/
The real graduation rate for in 2012 was 68.2% when compared to that same class when they were in 9th grade, but that year there were 502 seniors meaning 53 did not graduate on time but finished their senior year.
THANKS, Lloyd. I guess we have an “arithmatic” crisis in D.C.
Bothering to analyze official statistics is a complete waste of time.
The statistic you want is where did those students who left go? How many moved away or went to another private/charter school? How many came back to public schools? A public school typically has to account for transfers in and out. Since the local schools here are good, they are interested in identifying trends that suggest changes may be necessary. Hasn’t happened.
I worked with a diverse public school that once had a 100% graduation rate—very few left from 9th grade. Is it coincidence that as the school was pushed to take more students w/o increasing number of counselors or other student supports, decreased time for students to get help, use the computers or study or even just breathe and focused more on data (aka test score growth) there are students falling through the cracks?