(07-16) 16:23 PDT SACRAMENTO -- California's first true count of high school dropouts shows that one in four kids quit school last year - 127,292 - which is far more than state educators estimated before they began using a new student-tracking system.

The statewide 24-percent dropout rate also shows African American and Latino students leaving school at much higher rates than other ethnic groups, according to data released today by state schools chief Jack O'Connell.

The dropout rate is well above the 13 percent (67,107 students) that educators had earlier estimated using a less sophisticated counting method relied on for years.

"I was quite shocked at how many students are falling through the cracks," said O'Connell. "This is a crisis."

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The state Education Department says it can now calculate dropouts far more accurately using its new "Statewide Student Identifier System" in which every student is given a unique, anonymous ID number. With that, schools can track the whereabouts of missing students for the first time, and learn whether students are truly AWOL, or whether they are somewhere legitimate.

Did they leave the state? Join a homeschool? Die? The new system recognizes 29 kinds of student invisibility, 10 of which are logged as dropouts, including "expelled."

One stunning fact they learned was that 53,600 students who claimed they were transferring to a new school never actually showed up.

Another is that the state now knows for the first time that there were 4,609 dropouts who completed all graduation requirement but one: the exit exam, which became mandatory two years ago.

"Today, we have the tools for the first time to report the rates with a much greater degree of accuracy than in the past," O'Connell said.

The new report shows that 42 percent of black students and 30 percent of Latinos quit high school last year- far more than the state average, and far more than state officials had thought.

They had estimated that 10,000 black students quit - but the real number was nearly twice as high: 19,440.

For Latinos, the estimate was that 37,716 had quit. The real number was a shocking 69,035.

Here are the dropout rates for other ethnic groups:

-- Native Americans: 31% (1,440 students).

-- Latinos: 30% (69,035 students).

-- Pacific Islanders were next: 28 % (964 students).

-- Whites: 15 % (26,165 students).

-- Filipinos: 12 percent (1,687 students).

-- Asian Americans: 10 % (4,462 students).

-- Others: 31 % (4,099 students.)

E-mail Nanette Asimov at nasimov@sfchronicle.com