PROVIDENCE — Two high schools here have the highest graduation rates in the state, surpassing Barrington High School. But the majority of the district’s high schools lag far behind the state average of 70.1 percent.

Providence is truly a tale of two cities, however.

Under the state’s new formula, Times{+2}, a charter school with only 13 graduates in the Class of 2007, graduated 100 percent of its students. Classical High School, where students must pass an examination for admission, graduated 96.7 percent of its 275 seniors. Another charter school, Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy, posted a graduation rate of 95 percent for its 60 seniors.

But the rest of the city’s high schools posted graduation rates ranging from 66.8 percent for Providence Academy of International Studies to 52.9 percent for Hope High School’s Technology Academy. Those graduation rates were comparable to other urban high schools in Rhode Island, including Shea High School in Pawtucket and Woonsocket High School.

Under the old formula, the district’s graduation rate, at 82.1 percent, was steadily improving, according to Supt. Donnie Evans. The district hasn’t calculated a rate based on the new formula.

Statewide, the high school graduation rate is 19 percentage points lower than previously reported.

According to state and local education officials, there are two reasons why graduation rates dropped throughout the state. The previous method included all graduates regardless of how many years they spent in high school. The new formula includes only those students who graduated in four years.

High school principals said the new formula doesn’t give urban schools credit for getting at-risk students to graduate in five years.

“Our mission statement says that children should be allowed to grow at their own pace and that time should not be a deciding factor,” said K.C. Perry, the principal of Feinstein High School. “Sixteen percent of our kids are still in school after four years. Of the kids listed as dropouts, eight are graduating June 10 and all are going to college.”

Previously, students who left school were listed as “unknown” and were not counted as dropouts. Under the new calculation, these students are listed as dropouts.

Again, local school officials said that this approach doesn’t take into account the constant movement of students from city to city, state to state and even country to country.

Michael Sollitto, the principal of Mount Pleasant High School, said students enter urban high schools performing two, three and sometimes four years below grade level. In Providence, some students arrive with little or no formal education while others come to Rhode Island with little proficiency in English.

“One student enrolled here in August and withdrew the next day and no one knew where he went,” Perry said. “That student is counted as a dropout but she just disappeared.”

However, the state has a four-year-old system that assigns each student a number, called a universal student identifier, which enables schools to track students as they move from one school to another. As long the student remains in Rhode Island, a school district should be able to track that student’s whereabouts. A number of Providence students, however, move back and forth between Rhode Island and the Dominican Republic.

Evans agrees with the new method because it keeps schools from fudging dropout rates, as some districts have done in the past. But he said that schools should be given greater latitude in terms of the time it takes for students to graduate.

Next year, though, the Rhode Island Department of Education will report five-year graduation rates, something that urban schools will welcome.

Under a plan approved by the U.S. Department of Education, the state Department of Education agreed to report the 2007 graduation rates for informational purposes only. Beginning with the class of 2008, RIDE will use the new graduation rate formula to determine whether high schools have met annual yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind act. Schools that do not meet the NCLB goals face a series of increasingly punitive measures.

With the exception of Classical, size does seem to matter when it comes to graduation rates. Lawrence E. DeSalvatore Jr., head of school at Textron, said the school has the luxury of size and extra resources. The support that the charter school gets from Textron Inc. and the Chamber of Commerce allows the school to hire two deans, each of whom is responsible for two grades.

The deans are also responsible for addressing the student’s nonacademic needs, whether it’s homelessness or a health issue.

“I think that’s a big piece,” DeSalvatore said. “One of our deans is an attendance officer. He is in constant contact with parents. When you are as small as we are, you know all of the kids by name.”

On the district level, Providence is trying to make its high schools more personal. In keeping with the state’s new graduation requirements, the district has introduced student advisories at every high school, although Evans said that some schools are further along than others in developing these student-teacher gatherings.

The district also has a separate credit-recovery program that allows students to make up course work after school and during the summer. It is specifically designed for students who are in danger of failing because they are missing a large number of credits.

And Hope High School has created something called the I-Pass, a nationally recognized road map that spells out a student’s academic, social and personal goals, including which courses they need to graduate. Parents must sign the I-Pass to show that they have reviewed their child’s academic plan.

Evans thinks that the best way to reduce the dropout rate is to create a uniform curriculum so that when students move from one to school to another, algebra I looks the same at Mount Pleasant as it does at Central.

A recent independent evaluation by PDK consultants said student achievement wouldn’t make any real gains until the district implemented a core curriculum across the school system. The district will begin to write that curriculum this summer.

lborg@projo.com