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As someone who knows and has written about the history of graduation and attrition measures, I am well aware of the problems with most attempts to measure graduation and dropping out. I am also saddened at the duplication of efforts in K-12 and higher education and the failure of education researchers and policymakers to learn from fields such as demography and epidemiology, where measuring life-course events is routine.

While others have proposed what I see as lumbering efforts to track individual students, there is a simple way to know how many students eventually graduate and do so in a relatively painless method.

• B.A., Haverford College, 1987, history.
  
• M.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1992, demography.
• Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1992, history.
• Post-doctorate position, Vanderbilt University, 1993-96, special education.
  

Dorn, Sherman. 1993. Origins of the "dropout problem."  History of Education Quarterly 33: 353-373.

Dorn, Sherman. 1996. Creating the dropout: An institutional and social history of school failure. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Dorn, Sherman, and Erwin V. Johanningmeier.  1999.  Dropping out and the military metaphor.  History of Education Quarterly 39:  193-98. 

Dorn, Sherman.  2003.  High-stakes testing and the history of graduation.  Education Policy Analysis Archives 11, 1 (entire issue).  Available at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n1/.

Dorn, Sherman. 2006.  Inflation of official Florida graduation rates.  Working paper available at http://www.shermandorn.com/mt/archives/000560.html.

Dorn, Sherman. (n.d.). Graduation and migration. Manuscript under peer review.