On the blogs: Adams, Knowles inflate dropout rate
July 24, 2009
On Our Global Education, Kenneth Libby dissects the source of Mayor Sam Adams’ and school board member Pam Knowles’ erroneous claim of a forty-something percent dropout rate in Portland Public Schools.
The source? A Gates Foundation-funded study. The actual dropout rate is something less than 37%. The study counts 63% of students graduating (57% within four years of starting ninth grade and another 6% within five years), but cannot account definitively for the remaining 37%. Some are dropouts, but some transfer to schools that use different accounting, for example.
Steve Rawley published PPS Equity from 2008 to 2010, when he moved his family out of the district.
