Indiana reverses decision to count hundreds of hidden dropouts
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January 5, 2021
The Indiana State Board of Education on Wednesday quietly rescinded an earlier decision to count nearly 1,100 additional students who left school without diplomas as dropping out.
Instead, under a new, more lenient policy, the state will categorize about 470 students from the class of 2020 as having dropped out sometime during high school. The rule determines whether students who withdrew to be home-schooled should be left out of graduation rates. Those students did not have the required documentation to mark them as home-schoolers.
A Chalkbeat investigation found some schools inflated graduation rates by mislabeling students who should be counted as dropping out as home-schoolers. Sometimes schools recorded few or no dropouts but dozens of home-school withdrawals.