AS WE come to the end of another school year, it seems appropriate to take another look at students who have brought their school careers to a premature end--dropouts. Dropouts have become big news lately. The National Governors Association made them an issue in 2005. The 9 April 2006 cover of Time reads, Dropout Nation. And a methodologically pathetic Gates Foundation-funded report from Peter Hart, The Silent Epidemic, interviewed dropouts to see why they left school. The current conventional wisdom holds that the high school graduation rate is about 70%, but only around 50% for blacks and Hispanics and 25% for minorities in the cities. The December 2005 Research column summarized Paul Barton's report of the conventional wisdom, One Third of a Nation: Dropouts Rising, Opportunities Declining. I've always had difficulty accepting these numbers. First, anyone who's ever worked in a school district knows how fuzzy dropout data are. And in several state accountability systems, the numbers have had high stakes attached to them, which has led to their further corruption. The most notorious instance of this, of course, was Sharpstown High School in Houston, which had more than 1,000 ninth-graders, fewer than 300 seniors, and zero dropouts. When assistant principal Robert Kimball called public attention to this anomaly, he was shunned and had to seek employment elsewhere. (He sued and received $90,000 from the district.) Second, the Digest of Education Statistics 2004 states that in 2003 there were 19.24 million Americans aged 14-17. If only 70% of that number graduate from high school, it would mean that every year we are dumping 1,443,000 kids onto the streets without diplomas. Over a decade, I would think these millions would have shown up in reports on social indicators: employment rates, crime rates, etc. But I've seen none of that. Now come Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) to say that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Mishel first made his case in Education Week on March 8 of this year. Then he backed that up in a book with co-author Roy titled Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends, published in April 2006 by EPI. The usual method of calculating a graduation rate or a dropout rate is to compare the size of a ninth grade to the number of diplomas granted to that cohort four years later. One immediate problem with this method is that, as a matter of policy, schools have been increasing the number of students they hold for two years in the ninth grade. For example, ninth-grade retention rates in Massachusetts rose from 6% in 1994 to almost 9% in 2001. Graduation rates would be significantly higher, says Mishel, if the ratio were based on the number of entering ninth-graders in a particular year, but no one calculates this. Jay Greene, Marcus Winters, and Christopher Swanson attempted to compensate for this ninth-grade bulge by using an average of eighth, ninth, and 10th grades. Their rejoinder to Mishel's essay appeared in the March 29 Education Week. Mishel and Roy contend that, while this modification attenuates the bias, it doesn't eliminate it. Using longitudinal data from Florida and New York City, Mishel and Roy obtain much higher graduation rates than Greene and his colleagues. Mishel and Roy think the usual means of calculating dropouts is fundamentally flawed. They contend that, at the very least, the method has never been checked for accuracy. Schools send figures to the district, the district sends numbers to the state, and the state forwards them on to the National Center for Education Statistics, which dutifully reports them in its Common Core of Data (CCD). There are lots of places for inaccuracy to slip in. For instance, the April 9 issue of Time reported that for years Shelbyville, Indiana, counted as graduates everyone who left school and promised to take the GED. …