A coalition of education organizations has set a goal of 90% graduation by 2020, and the government recently released a report suggesting that the U.S. may in fact get there. The Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm, just released data showing that the four year graduation rate for the 2011-2012 school year was up to 80%, an increase of 1% from the previous year. While the achievement gaps associated with race, class, and special needs are certainly still present, minority groups on the whole averaged a 2% increase, outpacing the overall increase of only 1%.
It has only been since 2005 that these kinds of figures have even been a possibility. That was the year that states, under the auspices of the National Governors Association, first agreed to begin tracking graduation rates. Since that time, federal encouragement and eventually mandates for states to keep such records have increased, meaning that the government can finally analyze graduation data across states more accurately.
One of the interesting factoids from the new data is the high discrepancy between states’ graduation rates. For examples, the graduation rate was 59% in Nevada and 93% for Vermont.
Within states, there are also some interesting pieces of evidence. For example, Louisiana had an overall graduation rate of 72%, only eight points below the national average of 80%, but students in special education were more than 25 points below the national average for that subgroup—at 33 percent.
A coalition of groups including Civic Enterprises, the Everyone Graduates Center, America’s Promise Alliance, and the Alliance for Excellent Education has campaigned for a national goal of 90% graduation by 2020. They also released their own report discussing the new data.
Of course, this positive news is tempered by two key facts. First off, there really are no viable statistics showing how successful those high school graduates are in college. What research there is tends to show that many disadvantaged students who do graduate high school often struggle to finish even a few years of college, let alone graduate. Secondly, states, under the Education Department waiver system, have extremely diverse methods of factoring graduation rates into their overall accountability systems. In other words, just because a state may be far behind the national graduation rate average does not necessarily mean that the state will be mandated to make changes to fix the problem.
For more information, please visit the following links:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014391.pdf
