More on the Education Week Graduation Ranking

The Baltimore Sun - Inside Ed:  Graduation Rate and Maryland Schools

...Ed Week does its best using the only data available for school systems across the nation, but it cannot actually track students. Rather, the graduation rate is an estimate based on the numbers of students who are in each grade that year in the district. So the rate does not take into account the students who graduate in five years nor does it try to compensate for what is known as the ninth-grade bulge. Many ninth-graders in the city don't pass all their classes and spend an extra half-year classified as a ninth-grader although they technically have nearly enough credits to be a 10th-grader.

In other words, the ninth grade looks larger than it really is and the number who eventually graduate is smaller than it should be.

So the Education Week researchers acknowledge that there may be a 14-point discrepancy in the true graduation rate and what they report...