The headline reads Dropout rates below 1%. Eight paragraphs into the love fest we find out what (pat on the back) I was just complaining about a few weeks ago.
As Reported by Ted Seifer, Union Leader..
The plunging dropout rate is due in part to changing methodologies for calculating the number.
Starting with the 2007-0-8 school year, the education department narrowed the drop out category to one of three kinds of “ early exit non-graduates.”
The change contributed to a sharp decline in the drop-out rate, which, while failing modestly over much of the decade, hovered in the 3 to 4 percent range.
So we didn’t lower the number of drop outs we just changed what we call drop outs so that there appears to be less of them. Well there’s a policy prescription we can recycle.
How about we use that kind of thinking to solve the unemployment problem? Oops, they already did that.
And the state deficit, heck the federal one as well, just change the way we look at it, and suddenly–no more problem. Only we still have the problem. Now that’s what I call leadership.
The New Media Militia 