Low-flying high schools. (Scan).(statistics on high school graduates)(Brief Article)

For years, bureaucrats around the country have bandied about high-school graduation rates of around 86 percent as evidence that America's public schools work. But many of these high-school "graduates" did little more than warm a chair for four years.

A new study from the Manhattan Institute and the school-choice advocacy group Black Alliance for Educational Options shines some light on official graduation rates. Rather than the 86 percent graduation rate released by the federal government, the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene finds that high-school graduation stands at only 74 percent. While nearly 80 percent of whites finish high school, blacks and Latinos finish secondary school at truly dismal rates: 56 percent and 54 percent respectively.

Greene took the commonsense approach of counting the number of eighth-graders in public schools during the 1993-94 school year and comparing it to the number of graduates in 1997-1998. The disparity between official counts and the new study comes from the government's practice of counting students who hold General Equivalency Development credentials (GED) as graduates. But students with GEDs took some review courses and an exam; they didn't finish high school.

While supporters of the educational status quo might take comfort from the reasonably high GED completion rate among dropouts, most research has shown that GEDs don't come anywhere near the value of completing high school. In one widely cited study, Columbia University's Stephen Cameron and University of ...