Diplomas Count leaves me empty.

As Maureen says, there’s been a lot of "buzz in the blogosphere" about Diplomas Count 2008: School to College: Can State P-16 Councils Ease the Transition?, a new report that “examines states' efforts to forge stronger connections between precollegiate and postsecondary education.” Or does it?

I just got off of a call where the two main researchers, Amy Hightower and Christopher Swanson, from Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center walked us through this summary PPT presentation of the report. Their findings show that 1.23 million students nationwide will not graduate in 2008. Put another way, 3 in 10 students failed to graduate with their class this year. But since the release of this report just yesterday, there’s been a flood of folks disputing this data and the methodology used by EPE Research. Check out this eduwonkette blog which links to papers from the Education Policy Analysis Archives challenging the numbers.

After hearing that buzz, I went to trusty ‘ole google to see what else popped up, and it seems this report has ruffled feathers in Florida, Virginia and Maryland, Tennessee and Georgia, and even peeps from my stomping grounds of Hawaii had something to say.

Now, research is a tricky thing. Different methodologies, variables, etc. will give you different results. That seems to be what happened here.

The second half of the report gets into comparing P-16 councils in the U.S. Basically, these councils were created to help connect the different education sectors from early learning through higher-ed to develop a more streamlined system so all kids are prepared for college and work. Washington state has a P-20 Council chaired by Governor Gregoire.

Amy went through the baseline information they gathered on these councils, from how many there are nationwide, who’s represented on them, and what issues they tackle. (All this can be found in the latter half of their ppt)

But at the end of all this, I was left kind of empty. The question of Can State P-16 Councils Ease the Transition? – posed in the title of this report – was answered with three words: “We don’t know.” The councils are too young and it’s unclear, even in Washington, exactly what they will accomplish. As Amy said on the call, “the jury’s still out” on that one.

Oh well, at least their cool interactive map and graduation briefs are fun.