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HOUSTON - Crystal Gonzalez, 17, gave up on high school in Houston's East End neighborhood earlier this year. She never made it past ninth-grade.
''They told me there was no hope. It would take me so many years to graduate,'' said Gonzalez, held back twice at Channelview High School because of poor attendance. ''They told me it would be better for me to get my GED. They probably had other students that needed to be in school more.''
She left a system that doesn't consider her a dropout since she is working toward a General Equivalency Diploma. Some say Texas schools are nudging out low performing students who may drag down standardized test scores.
''The dropouts become absolutely necessary because what they are trying to do is get the [test] numbers up, not improve the education of the children,'' Rice University researcher Linda McNeil said. ''What this system sets up is it rewards the principals who get those kids out of the building.''
It's called a ''leaver'' code system, and it's used to disguise dropout rates, said Maria Robledo Montecel, San Antonio-based director of the Inter-cultural Development Research Association.
School districts in Texas can use any one of about 30 ''leaver'' codes to explain a student's disappearance. About 20 of the codes, ranging from pursuit of a GED to imprisonment, exempt a student from being counted as a dropout, which, along with standardized test scores, is used to determine a district's annual accountability rating by the Texas Education Agency.
''Students who leave school without graduating and go to prison are not counted as dropouts, but what else are they?'' asked Jay Greene, a senior fellow with The Manhattan Institute, an independent public policy organization in New York.
Robledo Montecel said 2 million Texas students dropped out of school since 1986 when her non-profit organization, which advocates quality education for all students, first began statewide dropout studies.
According to TEA, the state's overall dropout rate for 2001-2002 in grades 9-12 was 1.3 percent, or 15,117 students, down 0.1 percent from a year earlier.
Robledo Montecel's numbers show in 2001-2002 that the dropout rate was about 39 percent, or 143,175 Texas students.
''We do not see the decreases in dropout rates that the state figures show,'' Robledo Montecel said. ''It doesn't have anything to do with how the districts themselves are doing things. It has to do with the actual approved definition in the state of Texas, which tends to undercount by not counting kids who get a GED.''
The wide discrepancy wasn't always true. In the mid 1980s, both numbers were very similar, Robledo Montecel said.
''Unfortunately, over the years, the state has pursued a course of trying to define away the dropout numbers, rather than actually decreasing the number of drop-outs,'' she said.
A state audit recently revealed the Houston Independent School District had altered ''leaver'' codes from the 2000-2001 school year to improve its dropout rate.
TEA auditors reviewing records of 5,458 students who left school that year found 2,999 had wrong or missing information. They're now considered dropouts for a year when HISD reported 1,251 dropouts.
The district must clean up its data reporting by February. Failure to do so could threaten the Houston public school district's state rating.
Since the 1990s, TEA has placed increasingly strict caps on how high a dropout rate can be for districts to be considered ''acceptable.'' An ''exemplary'' district has a less than 1-percent dropout rate, ''recognized'' is less than 2.5 percent, and ''acceptable'' is lower than 5 percent.
Houston's altered dropout rates piqued interest because Rod Paige was the district superintendent from 1994 to 2001, before leaving to be President George W. Bush's Education Secretary, Greene said.
''More attention [should] be placed on the systems that are being touted as the ones we should emulate nationwide, but I think some of the attacks have extra political motivation,'' he said.
Houston isn't the first Texas district to get in trouble for underreporting dropouts. In 1999, the Austin Independent School District and West Texas' Ysleta Independent School District were cited.
But underreporting dropout rates doesn't end at Texas' borders, Greene said.
''It is very widespread throughout the nation,'' he said. ''It is fundamentally a problem of public bureaucracies hiding embarrassing information about themselves.''
In Washington, for example, Greene says any student who can't be located isn't figured into the official dropout rate.
But in Cleveland, Ohio, where he says some of the most accurate dropout reporting takes place, school officials report only about one-third of their students graduate.
''They are telling things the way they are, even if it is embarrassing,'' said Greene, who thinks other districts could learn something from Cleveland's forthrightness. ''Let's set aside the issue of blame, and let's focus on what the truth is.''
HISD spokesman Terry Abbott defends the state's accountability system, saying it's been a success and helped reveal a dropout rate educators feel pressured to reduce.
''Before accountability, the public did not know how the schools were doing,'' he said.
TEA spokeswoman Suzanne Middlebrook said the agency is considering other methods of counting dropouts. She said the ''leaver system'' doesn't count students working toward a GED as a dropout, nor those who are incarcerated and enrolled in an educational program in prison because ''those students are actively trying to complete their education.
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