Isn't that comparing Apples to Oranges? Kerry's number could include children who never make it to High School and are therefore never "incoming freshmen".
Where's the whole truth???
Various groups play the numbers and manipulate statistics to further their own ends (no shock there). I wonder how many of these groups would be willing to admit that the breakdown of the family and discipline at home and in school is a major factor?
Here's your scare headline:
"Silent Crisis: Large Numbers of Youth Are Not Completing High School"
http://www.connectforkids.org/node/2776
some excerpts:
When the results are broken down by race and ethnicity, more than 75 percent of white and Asian students completed high school with a diploma. Graduation rates for black, American Indian and Hispanic students are closer to fifty-fifty -- 50, 51, and 53 percent respectively. Graduation rates were also substantially lower for students educated in highly segregated, socio-economically disadvantaged, and urban school systems.
(Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis, Urban Institute and Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2004)
http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410936
The national graduation rate for the class of 1998 was 71%. For white students the rate was 78%, while it was 56% for African-American students and 54% for Latino students. (Jay P. Greene, High School Graduate Rates in the United States, Manhattan Institute, Black Alliance for Educational Opportunities, April, 2002)
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm#14
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) finds a national high school completion rate of 86% for the class of 1998. The discrepancy between the NCES’ finding and this report’s finding of a 71% rate is largely caused by NCES’ counting of General Educational Development (GED) graduates and others with alternative credentials as high school graduates, and by its reliance on a methodology that is likely to undercount dropouts. ( Jay P. Greene, High School Graduate Rates in the United States, Manhattan Institute)
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm#14
It would seem to be a simple question of either having a diploma or not, but educators, researchers and policymakers throughout the country have long debated the exact definition of a dropout and exactly how dropouts should be counted. Some use enrollment figures to reach their conclusions, while others rely on population surveys from the U.S. Census. Some include GED recipients in their high school completion rates; others do not. Some account for the large influx of immigrants into public schools, and some do not. Some keep close tabs on transfer students; many do not. (Lucy Hood, High School Students at Risk: the Challenge of Dropouts and Pushouts, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2004)
http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/challenge_dropouts.pdf