By Michael McShane, Special to The Kansas City Star

The Kansas City School District recently announced a dropout rate of 5.9 percent. Compared with the dropout rate of 41.2 percent reported a year ago, it appeared as if the district was moving by leaps and bounds in the right direction to correct the problem.

However, when the numbers are crunched and the students are accounted for correctly, the picture looks a lot less rosy.

The Missouri Department of Education says when the Kansas City School District’s Class of 2009 started eighth grade in the fall of 2004 it had 2,629 members. When that class graduated this spring, 1,032 students earned diplomas.

It doesn’t take a degree in mathematics to recognize that does not add up.

The district maintains that calculating such rates is a “puzzle,” and while calculating the exact number of dropouts is quite difficult, arriving at a reasonable estimation is not.

It is a simple mathematical formula; take the total number of students who graduate and divide it by how many students started in eighth grade. If necessary, adjust that number for demographic movement trends and with a No. 2 pencil and a scientific calculator, anyone at home can estimate the graduation rate.

Let’s calculate it together. When those 2,629 eighth-graders were enrolled in the district, the total enrollment for the district was 26,968 students. When 1,032 members of that cohort earned diplomas there were 22,479 total students enrolled in the district.

If anyone were to take the number of diplomas and divide it by the size of the cohort when it started, they would find an effective graduation rate of 39.25 percent.

Now, some of those students may have transferred to other districts or charter schools before graduation for reasons other than dropping out, so it is helpful to adjust to reflect the demographic change in the district as a whole.

In that same period, the overall district enrollment declined by 16.65 percent, so it’s fair to reduce the number of eighth-graders to reflect that, which we can do by multiplying by 0.8335. After those calculations, the adjusted graduation rate of the district is really 47 percent.

This adjusted rate does not account for every student in the same manner as the district “accounting” process. However, it would take Enron-esque accounting to reconcile those wildly disparate figures.

As if erring in such a simple calculation were not enough, the district tried to obfuscate the information. By saying that the dropout rate is 5.9 percent, the district is referring to an annual rate.

That would be extremely informative if high school were only one year, not four. Saying 5.9 percent of the students drop out each year means that when high school is done, a quarter of the students have dropped out.

The district’s using that number as its dropout rate is the equivalent of your credit card company telling you the monthly rather than the yearly interest rate. It may make you feel better, but you’re still going to pay big.

The first step to healing is admitting that you have a problem. If the Kansas City district cannot admit that it has a dropout problem, how can we reasonably expect officials to do the right thing to fix it?

Michael McShane, of Fayetteville, Ark., is a distinguished doctoral fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and a native of Kansas City. He is a former inner-city high school teacher in Montgomery, Ala.