In today’s New York Times, this article by Sam Dillon reports that US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will soon introduce regulations that require a consistent formula for calculating dropout rates across all states. Wow! What a concept! Apparently, there are a lot of kids dropping out of school, and the states have been lying about the problem. Big time. When North Carolina revised their formula, their dropout rate soared from 5% to 32%.

But wait! There seems to be a fly in the ointment. Apparently, a large number of states don’t have systems capable of calculating the accurate number. Here’s the tricky formula: The number of high school graduates in the current class divided by the number of ninth-grade students enrolled four years prior.  (This gives the graduation rate as a decimal, multiply by 100 and subtract from 100 to get the dropout rate as a percentage.)

Excuse me? There are state departments of education that don’t have the numerical or statistical expertise to handle this? These are large organizations that somehow manage to write paychecks to thousands of teachers, administrators, and non-certificated staff every month. They manage billions of dollars in pension plans for those employees. They may choose to mask their appalling results, but if they claim they can’t calculate those results they are lying.

If I Were King, they’d have until Friday to get it done or lose their jobs. And their pensions.