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The high school drop-out rate in New York City may be higher than originally counted, according to an audit by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office.

The audit looked at a random sample of students who were supposed to graduate in 2008. Out of 500 general education students, it found the city discharged 74 pupils to other schools or GED programs but didn't have the proper paperwork.

It said all 74 should have been classified as drop-outs.

The report used this error rate to determine the real dropout rate should have been about 16 percent for general education students, instead of the city's reported rate of 13 percent. This also would have lowered the graduation level from the city's reported rate of 65.5 percent to between 62.9 and 63.6 percent.

Similar trends were spotted for special education students. The audit found 20 out of 100 randomly selected students should have been classified as dropouts. As a result, the correct dropout rate for special education pupils should have been between 20.6 and 23.8 percent instead of 17.2 percent reported by the city.

And the graduation rate for this group was probably between 8.6 and 9.4 percent, according to the comptroller's office, instead of the city's rate of 9.7 percent.

The comptroller's office concluded this error rate wasn't large enough to cause any substantial problems, though, because it found the city's graduation rate "to be generally accurate."

It determined that the city's department of education had been incorrectly classifying some students because its own guidelines weren't consistent with those required by the state. And it noted that the city amended its guidelines  for students graduating in later years.

Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said the errors often resulted from confusion.

"You've got kids who are very mobile, who are moving in and out of the state and in and out of the country and it's not always easy to get their parent to come in and sign a letter," he said, referring to one of the requirements to be counted as a legitimate discharge as opposed to a dropout.

Suransky singled out a case cited by the State Comptroller in which a student arrived in New York City from the Dominican Republic only to enroll in a public high school for one day before returning home. He said the city got a transcript from the student's school in the Dominican Republic but the state required parental notification of the child's move.

Leonie Haimson, of the group Class Size Matters, questioned whether the pressure to raise graduation rates could have had led some employees to deliberately under-count their dropouts. She said the department of education "should revise its excessively harsh and punitive accountability system."

However, Suransky said employees look for such errors and have even flagged a few schools that had big jumps in graduation rates. He also said the comptroller's report didn't dispute the fact that graduation rates have been going up.