RALEIGH - After years of claiming that nearly all public high school students graduated, the state released figures Wednesday showing that their actual performance is far worse.

The state Department of Public Instruction said 68.1 percent of freshmen who entered high school in 2002 graduated four years later. In previous years, the state used a different calculation method and said the rate was more than 90 percent.

"If I could, I would expunge those numbers," said state school Superintendent June Atkinson. "They were absolutely meaningless, useless pieces of information."

Atkinson said the new data confirm what many suspected. She said it will take an effort by schools, the community and "faith groups" to improve the graduation rate. The state and districts will have to do more to reinvent high schools, Atkinson said, adding that the state has already expanded programs such as Early College in which students can earn both a high school diploma and an associate's degree or two years of college credit.

As North Carolina's economy has continued to lose manufacturing jobs that required little education, state officials have pushed schools to ensure that all students graduate with diplomas, ready for college-level work. Last month, the state board approved new standards in four subjects -- freshman English, algebra I, geometry and algebra II. Beginning with this year's ninth-graders, passing scores in freshman English and algebra I are required to graduate.

State Sen. Phil Berger, the Republican minority leader from Youngsville, said the new figures expose how badly skewed the prior numbers were.

"We finally have accurate and honest reporting of our high school graduation rates," Berger said. "That's the good news, because until we know the scope of the problem, we cannot craft a workable solution."

New approach to data

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, states and schools are required to report a graduation rate.

Until this year, the state reported the rate based on the percentage of high school graduates who finished in four years. That figure, which has ranged above 90 percent, has been criticized by education advocacy groups as deceptive. Critics say the state's numbers didn't account for students as they moved through high school, instead tracking them only in their senior year.

For the new data, schools tracked freshmen who began high school in 2002 to see whether they graduated in spring 2006. Those who transferred to private schools or schools in other states were excluded from the final report.

Lou Fabrizio, accountability director for DPI, said schools lacked the ability before to accurately track students to meet the federal reporting requirements. Even now, all the data are self reported by the school districts. Fabrizio said DPI lacks the manpower to collect the data itself.

Gaps by race, sex

The data show large gaps among races, ethnicities and genders.

While 73.6 percent of white students graduated, the rate dropped to 60 percent for blacks and 51.8 percent for Hispanics. Though 72.4 percent of female students graduated, the rate dropped to 63.9 percent for males.

J.P. Buxton, the deputy state schools superintendent, said states are only beginning to agree on standards for reporting graduation rates, making it hard to determine where North Carolina ranks nationally. But the state's new numbers are in line with an estimate last year from the Manhattan Institute which had North Carolina's graduation rate for the Class of 2003 as the nation's 34th highest.

Fabrizio cautioned against assuming that the 31.9 percent of students who didn't graduate in four years have dropped out. For instance, he said that number includes groups such as students who are taking five years to graduate or who got a GED from a community college or adult high school program.

The state will release five-year graduation statistics after the end of the current school year.

'Not good enough'

But education leaders agreed that they need to improve the graduation rate.

"The high school graduation rate has been a long-standing problem in North Carolina and in the United States," said Howard Lee, chairman of the state Board of Education. "Our rate is not where we want it to be."

Locally, the Triangle has among the top graduation rates in the state. The Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system had the highest at 90.2 percent. Wake County had the third-highest rate at 82.6 percent.

The message repeatedly stressed Wednesday is that more must be done to help high school students graduate because getting by without a diploma is much harder now.

"It was good enough in the 1950s," Atkinson said. "It's not good enough when we know we have to prepare students for the 21st-century global economy. We have to have support systems in place to have a 100 percent graduation rate."