Ohhh! Those crackpot, inflammatory, irresponsible researchers and journalists! Woe be to these unskilled, incapable spewers (skewers?) of venom! Shame on these evil explosive exposers!
Rick Schulte and Lance Gibbons find themselves in yet another explanation of making ugly appear beautiful by using some cockamamie counting method of managing mischief! Specifically, Lance and Rick purport that some seniors are true seniors but don’t have enough credits to graduate.
A senior or not a senior! Why the mischievous masking? This smoke-and-mirrors attempt to discredit research should excite the citizenry to question. Indeed! The school board members, the citizens’ elected representatives, listen “attentively” to Rick’s explanation. Why, board members, didn’t you question and challenge Rick? Lance offers in a letter to the author of the study (letter to Johns Hopkins concerning “dropout factories” research, Oct. 30) that if 400 freshmen start and graduate four years later, the dropout rate is zero percent. That’s great!
He then goes on to urge that if grades 9 to 12 have enrollments of 530, 410, 360, 300, the dropout rate suggests 44 percent. Okay Lance, that’s fine too, but because some of these don’t have enough credits to be in the supposed grade they’re in, the calculated data is wrong according to you. It appears you’d have us believe the data are only good for your purposes and your rules. Eventually, these numbers must be reconciled: 400 is 400 and 1,600 is 1,600 any way you want to count and account. Your shenanigans fall far short of convincing correctness!
Now comes the defender of blather to throw more stones of absoluteness at the crackpots. The high school principal natters and concocts one example, which as far as I can discern is absolutely wrong. Plain and simple, the state figures he cites are not to be found in the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. As for the phantom dropouts, they must be accounted for later as dropins or dropouts whether they graduate. It should all come out in the wash; input minus output should be a finite, clear, number!
Asking three school board members, our elected representatives, for their method of calculating dropout rates has yielded two phantom responses and one reply which only raises more questions.
Past time for parents to demand an explanation free from smoke and mirrors! Past time for the citizenry and board members to ask questions, demand accuracy, higher standards, and accountability!
Fil Baca
Oak Harbor
