Never too old to learn.

• Position: Up Front - Student retention

As one measure of Eastern North Carolina's economic vitality for his cover story in our February issue, Ed Martin wanted to see what percentage of its students finish high school. Sifting through N.C. Department of Public Instruction data, he found what he was looking for: estimated retention rate -- the ratio of a school system's graduates at the end of a year to, in this case, its seventh-grade enrollment six years earlier.

If you know the percentage a school system has kept, it's simple subtraction to determine the percentage it has lost. But when Ed ran the figures, some were so large he feared he'd made a mistake. He called Raleigh to double-check his numbers and asked officials there to vet his methodology. "The losses that make up the retention rate are primarily students who drop out, I was told, but there are also going to be some who have died, moved away or might be going to school elsewhere, such as switching from a county system to an adjoining city system." Unfortunately, when we prepared the chart that ran with the story, we referred to this as the dropout rate.

The dropout rate, it turns out, is something altogether different, determined by a formula that is beyond my ken to fully comprehend, much less explain. Suffice to say, it computes the rate at which dropouts -- and there is a very specific definition of what is and is not a dropout -- leave a school system in a given year.

So what's the better measure to gauge a system's success -- or failure -- at keeping students in school? Though its retention rate was dismal in 2000-01, Thomasville City Schools' annual dropout rate -- 3.02% -- was well below the state average of 3.86%. In 2001-02, the system slashed it to 2.3%. One reason its retention...