Participating school districts conforming to the standardized dropout reporting system of a pilot project of the National Center for Education Statistics indicate that revising collection and reporting can be difficult but may yield more accurate results. Recognizing long-term payoffs, administrators nevertheless dislike the time and expense of…

To make educational assessments and comparisons meaningful, dropout data must be collected according to the same definitions, by the same procedures, and over the same time periods. A 31-state pilot project represents an effort by the National Center for Education Statistics to standardize data collection about high school completion. (SLD)