bee

Here’s an excerpt from a Sacramento Bee story this morning:

High school dropout rates fell significantly last year across the Sacramento region, according to figures released Monday by the California Department of Education…

In Sacramento City Unified, Rosemont, Hiram Johnson and Burbank high schools saw dropout rates fall around 50 percent last year.

Burbank is the school where I teach.

I asked Ted Appel, our principal, two questions:

Is our reduction real? To what do you attribute it to?

His succinct response was:

    1. Don’t know
    2. Don’t know

I jokingly said that his answers were not clarifying. He answered:

We can agree it isn’t bad news and we can attribute it to anything we want and no one will question it. That’s the real value of outcome data with so many variables.

How much other school related data do you think should receive the same response?