NYC Ranks 43 Out Of 50 Cities In Graduations
BY RICHARD GENTILVISO

New York City ranked 43rd out of 50 large cities in graduation rates for high school students, according to a national survey conducted by America's Promise Alliance. One of every three students drops out of high school each year in the U.S., or about 1.3 million annually the Alliance says.

The Alliance, formed in 1997, is the brainchild of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife, Alma. They are targeting high school dropout rates as a crisis and are planning to hold summit conferences in all 50 states over the next two years.

In the study, New York's graduation rate of 65 percent was worse than Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Miami, but better than Dallas, Minneapolis, Columbus, Baltimore and Detroit. Released on April 1, the 2004 data is the most recent for which comparisons could be made across large U.S. cities.

A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education (DOE) said graduation rates have risen 9 percent since 2002. But there is some controversy over the numbers because many states use various formulas to figure graduation rates.

New York City has reported a 77 percent graduation rate to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, but using a different method that includes students with GEDs (General Equivalency Diplomas) and excludes special education students, the graduation rate in New York for 2006 is 60 percent

Although NCLB requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, it allows each state to use its own formula. As a result, the U.S. Department of Education is moving toward requirements for a single method to determine graduation and dropout rates. These new regulations for calculating graduation and dropout rates would apply to official statistics from 14,000 public high schools in all 50 states.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who was to speak at an America's Promise Alliance summit in Washington, D.C. on April 1, said, "In the coming weeks, I will take administrative steps to ensure that all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time and how many drop out."

Although Spellings was not expected to say what the new graduation rate formula would be, she noted a 2005 agreement by the National Governors Association. In that agreement, a common formula for graduation rates is used by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth grader students that entered four years earlier.

On April 8, the New York State Department of Education added 11 New York City high schools to its list of failing schools, as required under NCLB. Queens Academy H.S. was the only high school from Queens.

The percentage of teachers who say NCLB has had a negative effect on public education has almost doubled in the past five years, according to a new survey of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).