President of California Parents for Educational Choice

On April 28, the California Department of Education released to the press a make-believe high school graduation rate of 86.6 percent.

It did so with as little fanfare as possible, because even the people who compile these phony numbers no longer bother to defend them.

In fact, California enrolled 482,270 entering ninth-grade freshmen in 1999, and graduated 341,078 seniors in 2003. Those of us who graduated from high school prior to the meltdown of California's public schools would be able to calculate from these numbers a high school graduation rate of 70.7 percent.

Until 1998, the CDE, in its annual dropout press release, trumpeted a dropout rate that was derived from totally unaudited reports from its districts. School district administrators, reassured that nobody was going to double-check anything, simply assumed that students who disappeared from class without an explanation had transferred elsewhere.

To further compound the falsehood, the CDE reported a one-year rate to the press, without bothering to label it as such. Thus, in 1998 the official California high school dropout rate the public saw was 3.3 percent.

Our group, California Parents for Educational Choice, successfully lobbied the State Board of Education in 1998 to force the CDE to disclose high school graduation rates. These simple figures are the single best approximation of how many students are graduating, and their complements, the attrition rates, are the one best measure of how many students are dropping out. It's true that a tiny number of students graduate by alternative means such as GED tests, but their numbers are small and turn out to be more than counterbalanced by, among other factors, the numbers of kids who drop out of middle school and never even start high school.

In Orange County, Santa Ana Unified enrolled 3,937 freshmen in 1999 and graduated 2,670 seniors in 2003, for a 32 percent dropout rate. While that's worse than the state average, it at least beats Los Angeles Unified, with a dropout rate of 53 percent, or the biggest loser among the state's largest 10 districts, San Bernardino City Unified, with a dropout rate of 60.7 percent.

Unfortunately, the CDE has stayed one jump ahead of the reformers.

Last year, it started to pass off a phony graduation rate in which is simply subtracted the old, phony, unaudited dropout rate from 100 percent, which is how they came up with this year's phony numbers.

The tragedy in communicating these false figures to the public is that not only do they understate the problem, but future figures derived from the same methodology can be counted on to show improvements. Since the raw dropout numbers are unaudited, the districts can be counted on to fabricate ever-rosier falsifications as the years go by, as they have for decades now.

The CDE claims that a new computer system will solve everything, and give us extremely precise dropout numbers. It won't. Not only is the computer reporting on hold because of the budget crisis, but even when it is up and running it won't provide dropout numbers any better than what we can now calculate.

It will bar code and track students within the system, but it tells us nothing about the kids we need to know about - those who aren't in school, whether they dropped out, left the state, or even left the country.

The few people in the California Department of Education who will comment on the record about why it is putting out a fictional high-school graduation rate justify it on the grounds that if we told the truth, we would lose millions of dollars in incentives from the No Child Left Behind act.

But it is these same people who justify giving our public schools a monopoly because they teach common values. Do we really want our children to learn the common value that if money is tight, cheating is justified?

California's shameful dropout rate is the greatest crisis facing the state. Our budget crisis will end someday, and we'll soon fix the worker's compensation mess. A teenager who drops out today, however, is a tragedy for the state for the next half-century.

The cover-up of the magnitude of this tragedy is inexcusable. The public deserves the truth.