This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It's not hard to believe that Utah's high school graduation rate has dropped. Even if you don't read the report from Education Week that says the percentage of Beehive State teens earning diplomas plummeted 5.3 percent between 1998 and 2008, just look around.
The percentage of Latino students among Utah school populations climbed sharply over that decade and the one preceding it. Latinos make up the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the West and 15 percent of overall enrollment in Utah. And the graduation rate for minorities is not good.
More than 30 percent of Latino students don't graduate, even according to the Utah Office of Education's own count. The dropout rate is also high for Native American and black students, though they make up a smaller percentage of the overall enrollment.
And then you have to consider that Utah doesn't begin keeping track of students until 10th grade. Many minority students never make it past ninth grade and many drop out even before that.
The Utah Office of Education disputes the report. While Education Week reports Utah's graduation rate at 71.9 percent in 2008, state data indicate a much different picture. According to its own research, which tracks individual students from 10th through 12th grade, Utah's graduation rate was 90 percent in '08, an increase from the 88 percent mark it had maintained for several previous years.
Education Week begins tracking the classes within each school, beginning at ninth grade. By the magazine's standard, Utah had the second-greatest drop in percentage of graduates in the nation; its graduation rate was 30th among all the states.
Utah officials say Education Week is pushing an agenda, but the publication's reporting, and its publisher, Editorial Projects in Education, appear to be unbiased. Still, 46 states, like Utah, calculated their graduation rates as higher than Education Week reported.
One Utah Board of Education member says ACT and SAT results should carry more weight than graduation rates anyway. But, by that standard, Utah isn't at the top, sitting at 10th in ACT scores among the 27 states in which, like Utah, at least half of students take the ACT.
Fortunately, the federal government will step in, starting this year, to set a standard way to calculate graduation rates among all the states. We can only hope Utah's ranking under the new standard proves the state's data reliable. We'll be watching.