Last week I wrote about the meeting of the nation's governors a couple of weeks ago and the survey released at the time which indicated that many high school students across the country know that they are doing academic work well below what they are capable of. I also wrote that what the governors must address most immediately and most forcefully was those schools which contained larger numbers of students who wanted access to challenging courses and were willing to make the effort to succeed but were thwarted by sub-standard schools. For far too long these schools and the students in them have suffered from the fact that society was willing to write them off, or at least look the other way, rather than to tackle problems head on.

Paradoxically, there is probably no better example of this aversion to tackling real problems than the issue of dropout rates, which also came up at the governors' conference. Dropout rates have historically been both extremely political and very, very hard to pin down. To the average person what a dropout rate should be defined as seems relatively simple and straightforward - the percentage of students going through school who drop out rather than graduate from high school. Logical, but not universally accepted.

Over a decade ago the schools in the city of Austin, TX computed their dropout statistics using different formulas accepted as valid by different states in the US. Depending on which formula was used, they found that their dropout rate ranged from 7 percent to 49 percent - for the same class of students!

You might reasonably think that all this game playing would have disappeared with the advent of No Child Left Behind. In fact, just the opposite has occurred. No Child Left Behind holds school districts and states accountable for performance with regard to dropouts as well as for reading and math but does not mandate a formula for calculating the dropout rate. This has led to some egregious manipulation of statistics. For example, North Carolina proudly reported that its graduation rate for 2003 was 97 percent (a 3 percent dropout rate). Independent experts calculated the real rate to be 64 percent. How did they manage that? Simple. According to Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute, North Carolina calculated its graduation rate as "the percentage of graduates who got their diplomas in four years or less...in other words, students who dropped out of high school were excluded from North Carolina's calculations altogether." New York has had its own problems. Dropout statistics, particularly from urban areas, are often full of discrepancies. Some students move through the schools and are then "lost" before they graduate (tens of thousands of them.)

This would be funny if it were not so serious - for the country as well as for the individual students and their families. These are real people who are entering the job market with minimal skills. Just excluding them from the calculations does not make them any less real. Real improvement in the quality of schools requires acknowledging realities, however painful they may be, and then moving to implement serious strategies based on proven practice.