Failing high schools.(educational assessment)

Among the "talented tenth," those in the top 10 percent of test takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971 and math scores have not budged since first measured in 1978. So say the latest (2004) results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's report card.

At the other end of the scale, dropout rates have actually increased since 1990, rising to 30 percent of all seventeen-year-olds. Among African Americans the dropout rate is running somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, a sad fact that remains one of the best-kept secrets in American education. Because few people know the facts, in a recently issued book, Michael Dyson scolds Bill Cosby for (accurately) lamenting the fact that only about half of African Americans graduate from high school. Dyson "corrected" him, saying the dropout rate is only 17 percent, an inaccuracy that earned Dyson warm praise from a New York Times book reviewer.

The reviewer's error only shows how successful the public education cartel has been in misleading the public. To hide actual dropout rates, most school districts report as dropouts only those who entered the year as seniors but did not remain in school until the end of that year. All other dropouts over the preceding three years--and all the summers in between, when most dropping out actually occurs--are statistically ignored.

The U.S. Department of Education has long been complicit in fostering that misperception. To his credit, Russ Whitehurst, head of the department's Institute of Education Sciences, is now actively working to remedy the situation, as are the nation's governors, who are now embarked on a Herculean effort to ...