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Many Americans reacted with shock and awe to a recent report stating that more than 1.2 million young people in the United States do not graduate from high school annually. But not me. Not only did it not surprise me, but I was glad to see it.

Not that I'm insensitive to the problem or take pleasure in the misfortune of others. Not at all. But I've been aware of the seriousness of the issue for many years, and I'm hoping this kind of alarming information will shake things up so something finally will get done about it.

Some of the findings are truly unsettling. Every 26 minutes, a youth in our country will drop out of high school. Nationally, only seven out of every 10 students successfully finish high school. Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities have graduation rates lower than 50 percent. It's no wonder the report is titled "Cities in Crisis."

Among other things, the study — which focused on graduation rates — found that students in urban areas are 15 percent less likely to graduate than those who attend school in the suburbs.

Hardest hit are the cities of Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and Indianapolis, where fewer than 35 percent of students graduate with a diploma.

Particularly affected are males and minorities. The report claims that male students have graduation rates eight percentage points lower than females, and that the gap between whites and minorities can reach as high as 25 percentage points nationally.

A study presented at the National Council of La Raza's annual conference last summer showed that education was the No. 1 issue on the minds of Hispanic voters, and the high-school dropout rates among young Latinos were their primary concern.

Yet we do not hear the presidential hopefuls putting education at the forefront of their campaigns.

The Bush administration reacted to the new report, announcing that it will be implementing changes in the way high-school dropout rates are calculated. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said in a press conference that from now on, states will be required to report high-school graduation rates in a more uniform way.

Up to now, they had been using different methods of measuring the dropout rates, which were sometimes based on unreliable information.

In some schools, for instance, a student is counted as a dropout only if he or she registers as one, which means the problem could be a lot worse than even the new alarming data suggest.

I guess this is as close as you can get to the administration actually recognizing that the so-called No Child Left Behind Act is not working all that well and is leaving many of our children behind. The education law attempts to punish public schools that don't live up to certain progress goals by limiting their federal funds. It would not be surprising if some school districts were coming up with creative ways to avoid getting sanctioned.

Secretary Spellings called the high-school dropout crisis a "silent epidemic."

But there have been cries for help through the years that apparently have fallen on deaf ears. Uniform ways of measuring graduation rates doesn't sound like a solution, but according to Spellings, President Bush likes to say, "You can't solve a problem until you diagnose it."

Let's hope they get a more accurate diagnosis, identify the source of the epidemic and begin treatment soon.

For the students, the consequences of not getting a basic education are serious. High-school dropouts are twice as likely to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and eight times more likely to end up in jail.

If you think the future of our youth is bleak, wait till you see what it does for the productivity of our country in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.