In the short run, therefore, many states will have to develop proxies for direct measurement of student achievement. States and localities should not have any difficulty producing counts of high school graduates and recipients of postsecondary degrees and certificates. The challenge in making the completion indicator operational is defining a valid underlying population on which to base the completion rate. For purposes of Perkins accountability, postsecondary institutions may want to limit their completion indicators to selected major subpopulations students 18 to 24, for example to make definition and measurement more manageable. Such a strategy, however, means not reporting on a substantial part of technical education activity at the postsecondary level.
Placement is a longstanding measure of accountability in career and technical education.
But despite years of experience with trying to measure placement in the workforce or the military, technical programs rarely have produced reliable information. Response rates to mail and telephone surveys have typically averaged about 25 percent, too low to produce much confidence in the estimates. States that have had the most success in monitoring job placement of technical education participants are those that have been able to link student records to information contained in unemployment insurance records. Designing indicators for reporting on gender equity programs may be the easiest task under the new requirements. The law is clear programs with less than 25 percent of one gender or the other are considered out of balance.