Hoping the good news on grad rates is true

The wires are burning up this morning with the America's Promise Alliance Building a Grad Nation report, which asserts a small rise in high school graduation between 2003 and 2008. The John Hopkins research center the Powell group has allied itself with is the one that successfully got reporters to repeat the term "dropout factory" as an indication of crisis and geographic/class inconsistency in who graduates, and it's the research center that is reporting a minor decline in the number of said dropout factories.

I hope the report's claims hold up over the next few years. I will confess my increasing skepticism about reporting of any measure other than the soon-to-be new federal graduation rate. As the Orlando Sentinel and St. Pete Times reporters have noted, even states such as Florida that are edging closer to a legitimate longitudinal rate (which the federal rate will be) are still fudging some matters. (In Florida's case, high schools are not held responsible for a dropout if they can persuade her or him to drop out and enroll in a GED course.)

In this case, Johns Hopkins and America's Promise are using the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate, which is vulnerable to at least two methodological problems that might lead to spurious changes. Offhand, I don't think that would be the case for the 2003-2008 time series, or at least the likely bias would be in the direction of lower reported rates rather than bias towards higher rates. So I'm cautiously optimistic.