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(Thomas Boyd / The Oregonian / 2009)

Oregon's 69 percent on-time graduation rate for the class of 2013 is the worst of any state in the nation, according to new data posted by the U.S. Department of Education.

Oregon ranks No. 49 in the nation with just one state, Idaho, unable to report its high school graduation rate, the federal report says.

For the class of 2012, Oregon ranked No. 46 in the nation, with Nevada ranking worse and three states unable to accurately calculate their graduation rates in the manner now required by the federal government.

The latest data paints Oregon as ranking even worse.

Nevada improved its rate from 63 percent in 2012 to 71 percent in 2013, leaving Oregon far behind. After Oregon, the next-worst rate for the class of 2013 was in New Mexico, where 70 percent of students earned a diploma within four years.

Oregon schools chief Rob Saxton, Oregon Chief Education Officer Nancy Golden and other state officials acknowledge that graduation rates are far too low. But they say definitions and requirements aren't identical from state to state, so comparisons should be made with caution.

Oregon, for instance, will change its definition of who is a high school graduate to be more inclusive, beginning with rates for the class of 2014, which the state is scheduled to release Thursday. That will likely raise Oregon's graduation rate at least 3 percentage points purely due to the new definition.

For the first time, Oregon's class of 2014 graduation rate will count as graduates all special education students who earn modified diplomas. About 800 students in Oregon's class of 2013 earned modified diplomas, so the 2013 graduate rate would have been almost 2 percentage points higher if they had been included.

Beginning with the class of 2014, Oregon also will count as graduates all students who met all the requirements to earn a high school diploma within four years but weren't awarded one so that they could remain enrolled for a fifth year of high school to attend community college on the state's dime. The state does not know how many students fell into that category but hundreds of students in Albany, Dallas, Redmond and a few other communities are known to have been steered on that route.

If Oregon's graduation rate for the class of 2013 had been 3 percentage points higher, by including special ed graduates and students who had earned diplomas but deferred receiving them, the state's graduation rate still would have been in the national basement.

If Oregon's rate had been exactly 3 percentage points higher, it would have tied with Georgia for the third-worst graduation rate in the country. If the rate had been 4 percentage points higher, it would have ranked fifth-worst in the nation, just behind Alaska.

At least two factors have been shown to contribute to Oregon's sky-high dropout rate:

> Oregon schools do relatively little to combat chronic absenteeism, which leads directly to students dropping out of school -- an epidemic chronicled a year ago by The Oregonian in its Empty Desks series. Oregon is believed to have the fourth-worst rate of students missing more than one-tenth of the school year, which makes it hard to learn to read and harder to earn enough credits to graduate from high school.

> A generation ago, the connection between finishing high school or attending college and earning a good living was not clear, as it is today. Young men could leave high school without a diploma and find good-paying family-wage jobs cutting timber, fishing or working in the mills.

Oregon officials are seeking effective solutions to Oregon's chronic high school graduation problem. Gov. John Kitzhaber and state lawmakers set a goal of having 100 percent of Oregon high school students graduate from high school by 2025 as well as having 80 percent of them earn some form of college degree or credential by then.

One strategy getting a lot of attention is a drive, to be launched next fall, to improve early literacy instruction so that far more students can read by the end of third grade. Research suggests that could pay off if done well -- but would affect the high school graduating class of 2025, at the earliest.

Students in Oregon's class of 2013 finished third grade in 2003-04, the year after lawmakers slashed spending on schools and Hillsboro lopped 17 days off the end of the school year. Oregon's per-student spending has never approached national averages since then.

Large pockets of students who failed to graduate in four years in Oregon's class of 2013 included low-income students in Portland Public Schools, 43 percent of whom did not graduate in four years; Eugene students not in the gifted and talented program (38 percent did not graduate); low-income students in Beaverton (38 percent); low-income students in Salem-Keizer (36 percent); and male students in Portland Public Schools (36 percent).

Oregon's best on-time graduation rate for low-income students in a school or district with at least 400 low-income graduates was in Hillsboro, where 74 percent of them earned diplomas in four years. The Oregonian has written many times about Hillsboro's highly effective approach to monitoring students who are frequently absent and using a multi-agency "care team" to help keep students in school and on track to graduate.

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com

503-294-7623; @chalkup