Mark Twain once said, “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”

The manner in which statistics are presented can make all the difference, and two groups can come up with different numbers for the same fact.

This is the case in the Federal Way School District’s graduation numbers.

Former school board member Charlie Hoff frequently cites Education Week, a national newspaper covering K-12 education, during public comments. Hoff cites the publication’s graduation rate statistic of 45.7 percent, which is based off numbers from 2006. Numbers are typically a few years behind due to the reporting procedure.

At school board and educational meetings, Hoff states these numbers. And now, the school district is responding. For the last few meetings, the school district and superintendent have been debunking Hoff’s assertions almost immediately.

“I’ve started to refute him,” Superintendent Tom Murphy said. “When people hear things over and over, they start to believe them. I want them to have the whole story, not parts.”

The state graduation numbers for that same time frame are at 72.2 percent, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).

This is a significant difference from Education Week’s numbers.

Education Week uses the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI) to calculate graduation rates, taking information gathered from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data database.

Education Week’s Web site, the CPI “represents the high school experience as a process rather than a single event, capturing the four key steps a student must take in order to graduate: Three grade-to-grade promotions (9 to 10, 10 to 11, and 11 to 12) and ultimately earning a diploma (grade 12 to graduation). Each of these individual components corresponds to a grade-promotion ratio.”

Education Week then uses enrollment numbers and counts of diploma recipients from the database to estimate the percentage of ninth-graders who will earn a standard high school diploma within four years. The CPI counts only students earning a standard diploma as graduates, a definition in line with that found in the No Child Left Behind Act. It does not count students receiving GEDs or alternative credentials, such as certificates of completion, as graduates, nor does it use generally unreliable dropout data, said senior research associate Sterling C. Lloyd of Education Week.

Lloyd also said that the graduation rates that the newspaper calculates were lower than state reported rates in all but one state for that year.

“The formulas used in some states may inflate graduation rates by including counts of dropouts that are widely considered to be unreliable,” Lloyd said. “Some state formulas have only counted former students as dropouts if they are known to have dropped out and been documented that way. States may have undercounted dropouts because they lacked the resources or data systems needed to accurately document or track all students leaving school without a diploma.”

Does that mean that the Education Week numbers are more reliable? Maybe not: A problem with the Education Week numbers is that they discount a lot of variables.

“When we look at October 2005 and 2006 headcount, they are just comparing a ratio,” said Sally McLean, chief financial officer for the Federal Way School District. “They aren’t taking into account any mobility in terms of transfers. It would be erroneous to say those kids dropped out. They have an underlying assumption that the numbers moving in are the same as moving out.”

The Federal Way School District has a mobility rate — movement by students within or out of the district — of around 50 percent. That movement can severely affect the Education Week formula.

In fact, if you follow all of Education Week’s formula, the newspaper assumes, based on its calculations, that only 1,097 students would graduate. However, in actuality, 1,241 did graduate. According to the estimates garnered by Education Week’s numbers, there were 1,393 students that left the district between 9th and 12th grade, or in the newspaper’s terms, “dropped out.”

According to school records, there were 1,771 confirmed transfers out of the school district, leaving 374 dropouts. However, because Education Week feels that many states do not properly account for dropouts, they do not take into account dropout rates — and lump everyone that leaves the school as a dropout. Washington state requires that schools must either confirm a transfer or mark the student as a dropout, so their numbers are quite accurate.

This isn’t to say that Education Week’s mathematical formula is fundamentally incorrect.

When Education Week’s formula is applied to a district with very limited mobility, it is much closer to the true numbers. For example, the state puts the Mercer Island School District at an 84 percent graduation rate, while Education Week puts that district at 82 percent.

“It’s a gross misrepresentation,” McLean said. “It doesn’t take into account a district that’s highly mobile, if your transfers in are not the same as the transfers out. It skews the data.”

There are other variables in the district that are not taken into account in the Education Week math, including Running Start students, who may actually may be homeschoolers who registered at the Federal Way School District to take a college class. They don’t ever actually take a class at the school, and they don’t count in the graduation numbers; however, they were registered in Federal Way schools for at least a short time, and are thus marked as a student and therefore a “dropout.” Internet Academy students also fall under this category of Federal Way students who may or may not actually sit in a classroom at the school, and can often be classified as a dropout under the Education Week assumption.

During the time period that Education Week reviewed, students were classified for their grade level by credits, not years in school. So students who had failed two classes during their freshman year of high school were still counted as a ninth-grader in the October counts. However, once they made up the class, they moved back into their appropriate grade status.

“We didn’t lose 600 kids,” Murphy said. “But we did have a lot of students fail two classes.”

While the Education Week numbers may be a shocker, they really aren’t the whole story.

“We’d like it to be 95 percent,” Murphy said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s not 45 percent.”