More than four out of five states have set up governing bodies to coordinate the work of all sectors of education, from preschool or kindergarten through college, but many of the panels have done little to get high schools and colleges on the same page, according to a report issued today by Education Week.

Thirty-eight states have at least one such council in place, and four others without them have an education-governance structure that serves a similar coordinating function, according to the newspaper’s annual “Diplomas Count” report. But just 21 states have an employee who spends at least half of each workday focused on the coordinating council’s agenda, and just 18 states have set any sort of performance goals for their panels, the report says.

“Experts suggest that for such councils to be effective, they need to focus on a few, high-leverage priorities; meet regularly; dedicate money and staff to keep the agenda moving forward between meetings; and set performance goals and publicly report on their progress,” the report says. Its findings echo a Chronicle analysis published in 2006.

The Education Week report projects that 1.23 million students — almost 30 percent of the Class of 2008 — will fail to graduate from high school with their peers this year. It says that, as of 2005, the most recent year for which nationwide data are available, 71 percent of all ninth graders were making it to graduation four years later, and just 58 percent of Hispanic, 55 percent of black, and 51 percent of Native American students were doing so.

The newspaper’s methodology in calculating graduation rates was criticized as “exceedingly inaccurate,” however, in a statement issued on Tuesday by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. The statement — signed by four economists, James J. Heckman, Paul A. LaFontaine, Lawrence Mishel, and Joydeep Roy — said the newspaper had wrongly assumed that the number of students enrolled in ninth grade is the same as the number of students entering high school. Because a substantial number of ninth graders are repeating the grade after failing the year before, the newspaper’s methodology ends up underestimating the overall graduation rate by nine percentage points and minority graduation rates by 14 percentage points, the economists said. —Peter Schmidt