Three days after Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that the department will ensure all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school, the Inspector General released a report highly critical of the department for failing to enforce a requirement of the law related to the reporting of graduation rates.

ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) has five performance goals. Goal 5 is that all students will graduate from high school. This requires knowing at any given time just how many students are completing high school. This is one area where the federal government would serve the future of the nation well by establishing and monitoring a uniform and rational system of reporting high school graduation. Essentially the Inspector General has said that they have botched this completely.

In the case of high school graduation every state was allowed to develop its own formula for reporting and consequently it is very difficult to get a picture that is even close to accurate. Secretary Spellings made her announcement at a press conference hosted by America’s Promise to release a report “Cities in Crisis: A Special analytic Report on High school Graduation”. The report debunks the myth that the nation’s overall graduation rate is around 85% and places it at slightly less than 70%. The report documents the importance of geography with a detailed analysis of America’s fifty largest urban districts and examines regional differences. There are a number of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas where an urban student has double the chance of becoming a dropout than his peers in the suburbs. The report concludes that the 50 city graduation rate is 52%.

The Inspector General’s report says, “If the department had been more assertive in requiring states to implement a longitudinal student-tracking system shortly after the enactment of NCLB, all states could now have four years of student data. Instead, less than a quarter of the states are using a system that complies with the requirements of the law.”

Tracking high school completion is not a simple matter, but it is absolutely vital that we find an agreed upon methodology to document the extent of the problem. More importantly are we willing, as a nation, to confront the issues that underlie the statistics and place our nation’s urban minority youth at such disadvantage almost from the time of conception? Will we provide adequate access to pre-natal care, early care and preschool, safe and drug-free neighborhoods and schools, and an economic revitalization strategy for our nation’s great cities?

At the close of her remarks on April 1st, Secretary spellings said, “As the president likes to say, you can’t solve a problem until you diagnose it. By shining a light on which students drop out, when, and where, we will not only better diagnose the dropout crisis, we’ll be on our way to ending it.”

I disagree.