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.
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Re: Report: N.C. dropout rate 12th worst
What's the source for that 95% number? I think you need to double-check your work there: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/newsroom/news/2007-08/20070906-01
State Superintendent June Atkinson highlighted the cohort graduation rate - a measure that moved up in 2007. "In 2007, 69.4 percent of the students who entered ninth grade in the fall of 2003 graduated from high school in four years or less," Atkinson said.