The alarming number of high school dropouts in America is hardly fresh news, but the topic itself has become a lightning rod of controversy and debate in the national conversation about the future of public education.

Bill and Melinda Gates have launched a campaign called "Stand Up" to draw attention to the crisis. Oprah Winfrey recently aired a two-part special titled "American Schools in Crisis" and Time magazine devoted its April 17 cover story "Dropout Nation" to the problems in U.S. high schools.

Pennsylvania's secretary of education, Gerald L. Zahorchak, joined the growing momentum Thursday by offering a report on what his department is doing to help increase the high school graduation rate and how students in this state measure up in the national picture.

"We're happy to say our state has a better record than the national report," Mr. Zahorchak said. "But if one child drops out, we believe it's one child too many."

State education records show high schools in Pennsylvania had a 12 percent dropout rate last school year, while the national average is more than twice that. But Mr. Zahorchak also acknowledged that there is no uniform system for determining what the dropout rate is.

The graduation numbers Pennsylvania officials provided to the federal government are actually 12 points higher than those researchers at the Urban Institute reported for Pennsylvania students in their June 2005 study on the national dropout rate.

State officials reported the dropout rate in school year 2003-04 was 13 percent. For the year prior to that it was 14 percent. The national graduation rate according to the Urban Institute and the Manhattan Institute hovers between 70 percent and 72 percent.

Those overall figures, however, mask a huge gulf between racial and economic groups.

According to studies done by the Manhattan Institute, Pennsylvania's graduation rate for African-American students was 58 percent in 2002, the latest year studied, and it has hovered at that level since 1997.

"When an organization is grading itself it often finds a way to spin the statistics most favorably to them," said Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

Mr. Zahorchak pointed to two state programs that address the challenge of engaging students and giving them a reason to stay in school. Those are Project 720, named for the number of school days in four years of high school, and Classrooms of the Future, an initiative that will give all students a laptop computer and revamp the way high schools provide career and college counseling.

Although everyone agrees the graduation rate should be higher, not everyone agrees the dropout rate is increasing. Among them is Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

"There are a lot of sources to compute high school graduation rates at the national level. Some are better than others," Mr. Mishel said. "Almost all of the best methods suggest that high school graduation rates have been growing."

Mr. Coulson disagrees with that blanket assessment and points to the Manhattan Institute study released last year which finds graduation rates have ranged between 69 percent and 73 percent for the past decade and currently stand at 71 percent.

"I'm not Catholic, or even religious, generally," Mr. Coulson said. "But if Americans found a way to make Catholic and other independent schools available to all children, it would do a lot of kids an awful lot of good. It's a sad thing that school choice is so political when we really should be deciding how to organize schools based on what's good for children."