No Child Left Behind... just left out or overlooked

Sam Dillon of the New York Times reported today in his article: "States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School" how official graduation rates reported to the Federal government are often grossly inflated or inaccurate. Many educators, administrators and others attribute this as yet another negative effect of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. NCLB does not measure completion rates appropriately and perversely awards school systems that push underperformers to drop out, thus leaving many children behind, the article reports. The Times had an interesting graphic of the discrepancies between the reported and actual graduation rates:

NDN has been advocating that we need to do more to prepare American students for a flatter, more globalized world, including our most recent, modest proposals: A Laptop in Every Backpack and Tapping the Resources of America's Community Colleges but this article reveals a deeper problem with our education system that was being masked by NCLB and will be surprising to some, but perhaps all too familiar to those students and workers who have been left behind.