More from the "Other Side"...
What you guys don't realize is oftentimes state funding is in part based upon graduation rates and college bound students. In short, it "looks better" for the school to be "sending" more students to college. I see this rule as nothing more than a blatant attempt to inflate a stat for "school improvement" purposes.
Let me give you a for instance- our school corporation is currently involved in a stated-mandated self-improvement process. We are required to meet three target goals, one of which is school environment. We are required to assess our environment, target problems, generate plans to bring about improvement, then quantify that improvement. So, how do we do that? Take attendance as an example. Schools lose money when students have poor attendance- that's a fact. How do you bring attendance up at the high school level? Why, you cull kids out of the middle schools that are problems and redirect them to "alternative programs", of course. Attendance percentages go up, school saves money. Incidentally, this doesn't hurt your graduation rate, either. Too bad for the kids in the "alternative schools" though.
College-bound percentages (as mentioned before) also affect the money a school receives. What do we do? We create what we call "Core 40" and push kids we believe are college bound into them. We of course steer them away from arts, music, business, and PE (those are the "dumb kid" classes). This may sound fine in concept, but ultimately the students wind up in classes that are no more worthy in terms of college prep what the student would otherwise have taken, while life-skill classes are ignored. It totally ignores the fact many kids can't or won't go to college no matter what, yet they are going to get shortchanged in order to help boost the school's "college-bound" numbers.
You are right to be suspicious of a school's stats on any topic. Schools play games because of the pressure to do so from big government mandates that are unrealistic or outright foolish. There are plenty of people making decisions about the way public shools work that have no idea what their ideas will do in the real world. Too many chiefs, not enough indians.