Struggling students being 'pushed out'

NEW YORK, July 31 (UPI) -- New York City schools are giving up on more and more students, most of them struggling academically, it was reported Thursday.

The students are being pushed out of the school system, their failure virtually hidden from the public, the New York Times reported. Officially the city's dropout rate hovers around 20 percent. But critics say that if the students who are pushed out were included, that number could be 25 to 30 percent.

These "pushouts" are reclassified under bureaucratic categories that hide their failure to graduate, the Times said. That includes saying they have gone to another educational track, or have left the city. But city data make it impossible to determine just how many students are being pushed out, where they are going and what becomes of them.

Those students represent the unintended consequence of the effort to hold schools accountable for raising standards. Chancellor Joel I. Klein called it a "tragedy" and both he and the mayor's office expressed a sense of urgency in correcting the problem.