State Event Dropout Rates for Public High School Students

State–level event dropout rates for public high school students are calculated using data from 1993 through 2002 from the Common Core of Data (CCD).¹¹ The rates reported in this publication reflect the percentage of public school students who were enrolled in grades 9–12 at some point during the 2001–02 school year but were not enrolled in school in October of 2002 and had not earned a high school diploma or completed a state– or district–approved education program.¹² Some state or district education programs include special education programs and district– or state–sponsored GED programs. State event dropout rates are useful for evaluating the performance of public high school systems in reporting states. They do not include information about individuals outside the public school system. Rates are presented for the 46 states and the District of Columbia that used this common definition of what constitutes a dropout (table 5). (See the Technical Notes in Appendix A for the dropout definition.) Because some states do not follow the NCES reporting rules, the CCD data cannot be used to calculate national–level event dropout rates from public schools.

• State event dropout rates for 9th– through 12th–grade public high school students: The 2001–02 CCD event dropout rates ranged from 1.9 percent in Wisconsin to 10.5 percent in Arizona (table 5). In all, event dropout rates for public school students in grades 9–12 were lower than 3 percent in nine states: Wisconsin, 1.9 percent; North Dakota, 2.0 percent; Indiana, 2.3 percent; Iowa, 2.4 percent; New Jersey, 2.5 percent; Connecticut, 2.6 percent; Maine and South Dakota, 2.8 percent; and Virginia, 2.9 percent (table 5). Nine states had event dropout rates of 6 percent or more: Delaware, 6.2 percent; Illinois and Nevada, 6.4 percent; Georgia, 6.5 percent; Louisiana, 7.0 percent; Washington and New York, 7.1 percent; Alaska, 8.1 percent; and Arizona, 10.5 percent.

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¹¹ The most recent year for which CCD dropout data are available for publication is the 2001–02 school year. More recent CCD data are reported later in this report (i.e., Average Freshman Graduation Rates for 2003–04 calculated based on 2004–05 CCD data).
¹² Some states report using an alternative 1–year period from one July to the next. Rates for those states are presented because event dropout rates based on the July–to–July calendar are comparable to those calculated using an October–to–October calendar (Winglee et al. 2000).