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"IT was time to boldly confront the facts.” That's what Mississippi public schools chief Hank Bounds told The New York Times about a decision to go public with accurate but troubling graduation and dropout data.

If only all school officials would act so boldly. It's not a well-kept secret that state reporting of graduation and dropout numbers is misleading, at best, as the Times story pointed out. Thousands more students go missing from public schools than reports typically indicate.

That issue has the attention of policy-makers in Oklahoma. State schools Superintendent Sandy Garrett acknowledges the state's 82 percent graduation rate undercounts the number of students who don't finish high school. Oklahoma is one of several states that will begin calculating graduation rates differently in a few years, Garrett said. And a better student tracking system should help, too.

The Legislature is considering a plan to add graduation coaches in the state's high schools with the hope of keeping more students on academic track to graduate and keep a closer eye on students at risk of dropping out. We support that effort — and the funding necessary to make it happen. Several state schools also have taken on ambitious efforts to catch at-risk students before they leave school. But we still fear too many schools take an ignorance-is-bliss approach to dropout and graduation rate figures that allows officials and educators to avoid criticism and accountability.

Schools have the primary responsibility to report student dropouts to district and state education officials. There's no requirement that school boards look over dropout data, Garrett said. Perhaps it's time for that to change. School boards must review financial audits, plans for gifted and talented education and other data. Either by rule or law, detailed dropout and graduation data should go before school boards on an annual basis, too.

School board members should be able to quickly spot whether a school is vastly underreporting its dropouts, as is the case with some inner-city schools that report a 100 percent graduation rate. Or they'll be alarmed at more accurate statistics.

In Mississippi, the school chief's disclosure of more accurate numbers led to an effort requiring schools to develop dropout prevention plans. Hand Oklahoma school board members a list of the known dropouts in their district (kept confidential, of course), and we'll bet board members will start demanding explanations and efforts to reduce the numbers here. At least they should.

The statistics alone are startling. Make those numbers real people, and the crisis nature of the dropout problem should become crystal clear.