State Event Dropout Rates for Public High School Students

State-level event dropout rates specifically for public high school students are calculated using data from 1993 through 2006 from the CCD. 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 2005–06 school year but were not enrolled in school in October 2006 and had not earned a high school diploma or completed a state- or district-approved education program¹⁴ 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 47 states that submitted data that could be reported for the 2005–06 school year; a "reporting states" rate was calculated based on data from the reporting states (table 5). South Carolina did not submit dropout data for 2005–06, and data for the District of Columbia, North Carolina, and Vermont were suppressed because reporting standards were not met.

• State event dropout rates for 9th- through 12th-grade public high school students: The 2005–06 CCD event dropout rates ranged from 1.7 percent in New Jersey to 8.4 percent in Louisiana (table 5). In all, event dropout rates for public school students in grades 9–12 were lower than 3 percent in 13 states: New Jersey, 1.7 percent; Connecticut, 2.0 percent; North Dakota, 2.1 percent; Iowa and Wisconsin, 2.2 percent; Kansas, 2.4 percent; Alabama, 2.5 percent; Idaho and Virginia, 2.7 percent; Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, 2.8 percent; and Indiana, 2.9 percent. Five states had event dropout rates of 6 percent or more: Arizona, 7.6 percent; Nevada, 7.7 percent; Colorado, 7.8 percent; Alaska, 8.0 percent; and Louisiana, 8.4 percent.

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¹⁴ 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).