2003-04 CO grad rates top national average

Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 13, 2007 at midnight

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Colorado high school graduation rates comfortably exceeded the national average in 2003-04, according to a report Tuesday by the journal Education Week.

The report shows Colorado with a 74.6 percent graduation rate, compared with a national rate of 69.9 percent.

That's up from last year's report, based on 2002-03 data, when Education Week showed a graduation rate of 72.5 percent, compared with a national average of 69.6 percent.

Gov. Bill Ritter said the gain over last year's report is "wonderful news to me, but we cannot regard a one-in-four dropout rate as successful."

Ritter has vowed to cut the rate in half over the next 10 years.

The graduation rates reported by Eduction Week are based on an analysis of federal data. They are dramatically lower than rates reported by the Colorado Department of Education based on reports from the state's 186 school districts.

The state figures show a graduation rate of 82.5 percent for the 2003-04 school year - 8 percentage points higher than the Education Week numbers.

The discrepancy is even greater for some local districts.

For example, Denver reported a graduation rate of 76.9 percent for the 2003-04 school year. The numbers released Tuesday show a 46.3 percent rate.

The Rocky Mountain News first reported on the discrepancy in a 2005 series on Denver schools.

The differences occur because Colorado school districts didn't always count students who left as dropouts, assuming that they enrolled somewhere else.

The Colorado Board of Education last year adopted new reporting standards. That should reduce discrepancies in future reports, said Karen Stroup, the education department's chief of staff.

Christopher Swanson, of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which conducted the Education Week study, said similar problems occur in other states.

Swanson said his report is important because it counters the misinformation.

"To the extent that that inflates the graduation rate, it's going to give people a false sense of security about how well the schools are doing, and it's going to lower the sense of urgency about the problem," he said.

In this year's numbers, Colorado girls, with a 77.6 percent graduation rate, were ahead of boys, with a 71.5 percent rate.

Colorado Asians, with an 80.4 percent graduation rate, were almost tied with the 81.4 percent rate of whites.

Indians, Hispanics and blacks trailed whites in Colorado.

But Colorado blacks and Indians were ahead of those same groups nationally. Colorado Hispanics were slightly behind Hispanics nationally.

Different results

Graduation rates for the 2003-04 school year were often far lower than school districts reported to the state, according to a study by the trade journal Education Week:

District Study

Aurora 82.9 47.9

Boulder 89.1 83.9

Brighton 84.5 54.5

Cherry Creek 91.8 87.3

Commerce City 61.1 63.2

Denver 76.9 46.3

Douglas 93.2 88.6

Englewood 61.9 57.8

Jeffco 76.3 81.5

Littleton 96.1 82.7

Longmont 85.0 79.5