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CHICAGO — In a last-ditch effort to strengthen the No Child Left Behind law, the Bush administration announced Tuesday that it will require schools to make sure low-income and minority students graduate from high school at the same rate as their white and more affluent counterparts.

Schools that fail to meet those goals would face sanctions, according to a wide-ranging plan unveiled by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

Currently, the law requires that schools meet a graduation target for the entire senior class. The new proposal would require that smaller groups of students — broken down by race, income and special-education status — each meet the graduation goals. If any one of the groups fell short, the entire school would be considered failing.

The proposed changes represent the most dramatic attempt by the Bush administration to hold high schools accountable for their trouble in retaining and properly educating the nation's poor and minority students. Recent research has revealed as many as half of all minority students leave high school without ever earning diplomas.

Spellings, who can make the proposed changes without congressional approval, called the nation's dropout rate a crisis and an economic drag on the country. She said educators, policymakers and lawmakers no longer can afford to ignore it.

"Over their lifetimes, dropouts from the class of 2007 will cost our nation more than $300 billion in lost wages, lost taxes and lost productivity," Spellings said during a press conference in Detroit.

"Increasing the graduation rates by just 5 percent for male students alone would save us nearly $8 billion each year in crime-related costs," she said.

Spellings' 16-point plan to strengthen No Child Left Behind comes as the Bush administration worries that the law — the president's signature domestic initiative, and the most ambitious school initiative in a generation — will be weakened by Congress or the next president.

The law came up for renewal last year but has been bogged down by political and policy bickering.

Under Spellings' new plan, every state must adopt the same measure for calculating the dropout rate, instead of the current hodgepodge of methods, which in many cases allows schools to severely undercount dropouts.

In Illinois, for example, the state doesn't count students who drop out in eighth grade or those who claim to be transferring to a new high school but never show up there.

Schools that fail to ensure that each subgroup of students meets the new graduation target would be subject to the same escalating sanctions as schools that fall below the test-score benchmarks set under the federal program.

States would have until the 2012-13 school year to implement the new rules.

It's not clear what the changes will hold for states that don't track dropouts by race or income, school by school. But diverse schools with the greatest number of subgroups are most at risk of running afoul of the new rules.

Fixing the nation's high schools and stemming the dropout crisis have become national obsessions, as test scores stagnate and jobs for dropouts evaporate.

States and lawmakers have responded by ratcheting up graduation requirements; creating smaller, more intimate high schools; and expanding after-school and summer-school programs for youths at risk of dropping out. But those efforts have not changed the landscape much.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the interventions aimed at helping kids stay in school do not attack the right problem in the right ways," said John Easton, executive director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, which has published the most comprehensive studies on the city's dropout crisis. "By looking more carefully at the variations within these dropout numbers, we are more likely to find the right solutions."

Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and a former governor of Virginia, said the new rules are a start but not a solution.

"I applaud the secretary," said Wise, who has pushed for changes in high schools.

"But the great weakness — and where Congress has to be more involved — is helping states use these new numbers to end the dropout crisis."