State educators say a recent report is incorrect.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction says a report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center got the state's own calculation of its dropout rate wrong.

The report said the state figured it had a 95 percent graduation rate — far above the report's own calculation of 67 percent using a different methodology.

But DPI spokeswoman Vanessa Jeter wrote Dome in an e-mail that the state's figures actually showed a dropout rate of 69.4 percent, much closer to the report's figure.

After the report came out, Deputy Superintendent J.B. Buxton wrote the researchers on June 3 to inform them of the error and request a correction.

"In presenting the report's findings at a news conference, the researchers acknowledged that North Carolina's numbers were out-of-date in the report and that our state has made significant progress in reporting the issue of high school graduation rates," Jeter wrote.

Previously: N.C. dropout rate ranked 12th worst.

North Carolina has the 12th highest dropout rate, a new report says.

The Editorial Projects in Education Research Center report found that 67 percent of state public school students graduated from high school with a regular diploma in 2005 — below the national average of 70.6 percent.

Only Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Delaware, Georgia, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico and Nevada had higher dropout rates based on the report's calculations.

The rate was calculated using the Cumulative Promotion Index, which tracks whether a student graduates from ninth, tenth, 11th and 12th grades.

For its own calculation of dropout rates under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, North Carolina uses the Cohort Rate, or the percent of students from an entering ninth grade class graduate within four years. Sixteen other states use a similar formula.

Under that calculation, the class of 2005 had a 95 percent graduation rate. The 28-point difference with the Cumulative Promotion Index was the second-largest gap in state-reported rates versus the number calculated by the research center.

Update: Agency say researchers misstated the state's own calculated graduation rate.