CA: State's new student tracking system yields higher dropout rate

1 in 4 California high school students drop out, state says

Los Angeles Times  July 22, 2008

The dropout rate in California schools has increased after being calculated using a new state student tracking system, which assigns every student in the state a unique ID.  The dropout rate of 24.2% for the state is substantially higher than the 13.9% calculated using the previous method.  This is the first year that the system has been in place so the overall rate is a "derived" rate that is an estimate based on this year's data.