It’s that time of year again. This month marked the end of another academic year for students attending traditional public schools in North Carolina. For high school seniors in the midst of graduation ceremonies, this time also represents a proud and much-anticipated rite of passage from the K-12 years to the world of higher education or work.

In North Carolina, seven out of every 10 ninth graders go on to don a cap and gown four years after beginning public high school. Far too many others, however, never receive a diploma: last year, 23,550 students dropped out of school. Programs intended to curb our dropout crisis, often called a “silent epidemic,” are widespread, in North Carolina and across the nation. As many educators and researchers have noted, though, accurate data identifying the problem is the first step on the path to solving it.

New data from Education Week’s Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center should shed light on graduation successes and failures in our nation’s 50 largest school districts. Three North Carolina school districts – Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Wake County, and Guilford County — were big enough to make EPE’s list. Both Wake County and Guilford County stacked up well against other districts, landing in the top 10 with graduation rates of 77.1 percent and 73.1 percent, respectively. Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s graduation rate of 60.5 percent placed it squarely in the middle of the pack.

EPE’s graduation statistics paint an alarming portrait of student attrition in other densely populated cities across the nation. At the bottom of the list, Detroit has an appallingly low graduation rate of 37.5 percent. Milwaukee and Baltimore don’t fare much better, with graduation rates of 41 and 41.5 percent. According to EPE, 6,829 students are lost from U.S. public high schools each day, and some 1.23 million members of the class of 2008 will not graduate with a high school diploma.

Frustrated by the magnitude of the dropout problem and states’ “inconsistent and opaque data reporting systems,” U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced in April she would push for a federally mandated, uniform formula for graduation and dropout rates. According to The New York Times, the move is “one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary,” as it impacts all 50 states, along with 14,000 public high schools nationwide.

When it comes to graduation rate transparency, North Carolina has made measurable progress. Prior to 2006, North Carolina was routinely called out for fudging the number of students who graduated on time. In 2005, the state reported a graduation rate of 95 percent that raised eyebrows. The next year, North Carolina moved to a four-year cohort graduation rate, honoring a compact signed by the nation’s governors. That rate is based on the percentage of students who enter ninth grade in a given year and go on to graduate from high school in four years or less. In 2007, North Carolina’s four-year cohort graduation rate was 69.4 percent.

More changes to graduation tabulations will soon be coming our way. Last week, the State Board of Education voted to approve a “framework for change” that calls for moving to a “five-year graduation rate for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) purposes” under the No Child Left Behind law. If approved by the U.S. Department of Education, this shift will inflate the graduation rate and make AYP easier to attain. The more stringent (and accurate) four-year cohort rate will still be reported by the state, but will not count toward federal benchmarks. The State Board also decided to tie graduation rates to teacher bonuses at high schools, a move that will mean “huge increases in bonus money,” according to the John Locke Foundation’s Terry Stoops.

Stay tuned as these changes play out over the coming months. In the end, though, one thing remains clear: we must remain committed to reporting accurate graduation data. Scores of students missed their chance to walk off a stage this month with a high school diploma in hand. Surely that should galvanize us to stay the course.

Kristen Blair is a North Carolina Education Alliance Fellow.