A Wise question about dropout factories

So where did all those dropouts go?

Cynthia Wise, of Seattle's KING 5 news, takes a critical look at a recent report showing a steep decline in the number of "dropout factories" in the United States. 

Here's what she found:

"In the Tacoma School District, for example, five high schools were declared 'dropout factories' in the [2004 report from Johns Hopkins University]. In an examination of their graduation rates now, all five would be off the list. At the same time though, the district's alternative school, Oakland, had an on-time graduation rate of just 4.2-percent in the most recent figures available." 

She explains: "Many of the state's school districts have reinvented themselves in a way that most of the kinds of kids that were in danger of dropping out of the 'regular' high schools that were studied in 2004 are now being placed in alternative schools — which continue to show staggering dropout rates, many of them losing 80-percent or more of their students."

Have the old dropout factories been supplanted by dropout industrial complexes, thus reducing the total number of failing schools but not making a dent in the number of failing students? We look forward to further investigations, of the sort that Wise has undertaken, in every state that has been credited with "improvement" in the report.