I recently read an Education Week article detailing the final approval on an extensive and wide-ranging set of final regulations adding new requirements on states, districts and schools via the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The Bush administration approved these regulations as Congress has continued to find agreement in reauthorizing the 7-year old law.

The regulations will require states to:
• adopt the same method of calculating high school graduation rates;
• mandate that school districts take additionally steps to ensure students in low-performing schools know they’re eligible to transfer schools or enroll in free tutoring; and
• make public information comparing states’ student achievement to national scores.

A main implication of the rule changes is that it will require states to update their formal plans that explain how they will implement key elements of NCLB due to these new regulations. Changes in those formal plans (called workbooks) that the Education Department must approve, involves explaining how states will develop content standards, assess students in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and hold schools accountable for student performance based on the goal that all students will be proficient in those subjects by the end of the 2013-14 school year.

Among the most significant changes involve requiring all states to adopt the same method of calculating high school graduation rates. Under the new regulations, states must track the percentage of students within four years of entering high schools. The regulations say that state proposals that count students who graduate within six years as completing on time will be considered by the Education Department. Additionally, schools must publish rates for students in racial, ethnic and socioeconomic subgroups, as well as for students with disabilities and English-language learners.

States must report data based on these new regulations in the 2009-2010 school year. By the 2011-2012 school year, states must use the new method of calculating graduations rates as one of the measures to determine whether high schools make adequate yearly progress (AYP), which is the method of determining whether a school is meeting its goals under the NCLB law, as well as improving graduation rates for students in every group for which they publish graduation data.

In the Improve Group’s work with state school districts and education initiatives, we have found that consistently reporting data across time, let along across different states, is a stiff challenge for schools trying to meet the government requirements for collecting and evaluating data. New regulations such as these could be beneficial in evaluating multiple issues in education such as improving graduation rates for multiple populations, but training in strong data evaluation methods and tools to accurately collect and analyze data would be of great use to the education system.