I’ve been away on a trip to England for the past two weeks; this is the first post since the trip.

On my way out of the Atlanta airport, I scanned the headlines of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and read the cover story headline: Student rolls don’t add up: Data shows thousands unaccounted for.  The jist of the story was that the State loses track of thousands of students each year, suggesting that the dropout rate may be higher and the graduation rate lower than Georgia reported.  The article in AJC is based on the analysis of nearly 1.8 million student enrollment records.  Although the AJC reporters were not able to track individual students, they found that last year more than 25,000 students were coded as transferring to other Georgia public schools, but no school showed them transferring in.

Heather Vogell, author of the article, suggested that we don’t really know what is the graduation and dropout rate.  She put it this way:

The system should give the public and federal officials a clear picture of how many students graduate and how many don’t; instead, it remains riddled with errors.

“Garbage in, garbage out,” said Cathy Henson, a Georgia State education law professor and former state board of education chairwoman. “We’re never going to solve our problems unless we have good data to drive our decisions.”

This falling through the cracks of individual students is a serious problem.  According to Vogell,

More than one in five 16- to 24-year-old Georgians are high school dropouts, reported Northeastern University in Boston and Chicago non-profit Alternative Schools Network.

This is a serious issue, and will require more than simply teaching to the State’s annual round of tests (CRCT).