U.S. Graduation Rate Continues Decline
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34swanson.h29.html
Every school day, more than 7,200 students fall through the cracks of America's public high schools. Three out of every 10 members of this year’s graduating class, 1.3 million students in all, will fail to graduate with a diploma. The effects of this graduation crisis fall disproportionately on the nation’s most vulnerable youths and communities. A majority of nongraduates are members of historically disadvantaged minorities and other educationally underserved groups. They are more likely to attend school in large, urban districts. And they come disproportionately from communities challenged by severe poverty and economic hardship.
A dominant theme in debates over high school reform, many of which have unfolded in the pages of Diplomas Count and Education Week, has been the need for hard, objective data on graduation rates. Such information provides needed insights on the severity of the challenges facing the schools at a given point, the groups and communities hit particularly hard by the crisis, the trajectory of change over time, and the effectiveness of efforts aimed at boosting graduation and preparing students for college and careers after high school. Yet that information has proved surprisingly hard to come by. Filling that knowledge gap and providing the public with detailed information on graduation rates and trends are among the primary goals of Diplomas Count.
By combining original analysis from the EPE Research Center with historical data published by the Education Department, this year we were able to follow the trajectory of high school graduation over a period of
nearly 140 years, a span of time that has witnessed the birth, growth, maturity, and, some would argue, the increasing obsolescence of American secondary education as we now know it.
Secondary schooling in the United States started as an essentially elite pursuit, with a mere 2 percent of the population acquiring the equivalent of a high school education in 1870, the earliest year for which data are available. It was not until several decades into the 20th century that Americans witnessed a quantum leap in engagement with high school, a transformation propelled by the ever-more-rapid industrialization of the U.S. economy and a continuing shift away from the nation’s agrarian past.
The share of the population with a secondary education increased threefold from 1920 to 1940, when, for the first time, a slim majority of American youths graduated from high school. Finishing high school became more firmly established as a social and educational norm in postwar America, as the
graduation rate rose steadily through the 1950s and 1960s. Completion rates peaked in 1969, with 77 percent of that high school class earning diplomas.
The next three decades were marked by a retreat from those historical highs; the graduation rate eroded incrementally at certain times and fell significantly at others, including a sharp drop during the first half of the 1990s. Although the nation regained some ground between the late 1990s and 2005, the graduation rate now stands at about the same level as it did in the early 1960s.
A snapshot of contemporary results for the high school class of 2007 reveals a striking pattern of disparities that have long characterized high school completion. Reminiscent of the inequities in other fundamental outcomes such as test scores, we find stark divides in graduation along the lines of race, gender, and regional geography, as well as school and community environment.
And, the gap between high- and low-performing states remains alarming. The national leaders—Iowa, New Jersey, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin—each graduate more than 80 percent of all high school students. At the opposite end of the spectrum,
fewer than 55 percent of students finish high school in Nevada, New Mexico, and South Carolina. A gap of 42 percentage points separates the top and bottom states. Overall, about half the states have graduation rates in the 65 percent to 75 percent range for the class of 2007.
All else being equal,
population growth among groups with low average graduation rates will tend to suppress improvements in the overall graduation rate. Pertinent to the case of high school completion: The
size of the Latino student population, whose graduation rate currently lags 21 percentage points behind that of non-Hispanic whites,
has grown by 50 percent in the past decade alone.
Put simply, the challenge of improving high school graduation rates is analogous to swimming upstream against a rapid and generally unfavorable demographic current. Many observers would argue that there is room for considerable improvement across the entire student population. The seemingly paradoxical findings noted here, however, would further suggest that targeting intervention efforts intensively on rapidly growing and low-performing student groups will be a precondition for driving meaningful change in the graduation rate at a national level.
A deeper engagement with hard data provides another important insight with implications for national reform efforts. The effects of the dropout crisis are widespread, affecting every state and corner of the country to some extent. But its most dire consequences are disproportionately concentrated in a relatively small number of places.
The EPE Research Center’s series of Cities in Crisis reports turned a national spotlight on the challenges faced by major metropolitan areas and the large disparities in graduation rates found between the urban cores of those regions and neighboring suburban communities. Those metro areas, which serve a large share of all public school students, exert a strong influence on the state of the nation as a whole. Other researchers, most notably Robert Balfanz and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and the Everyone Graduates Center, have similarly noted the national significance of “dropout factories” the lowest-performing tier of American high schools.
In Diplomas Count 2010, we seek to identify the individual school systems at the epicenter of the dropout crisis, by leveraging the research center’s comprehensive database of district graduation rates and conditions. By combining information about the graduation rate and school enrollment patterns, we can calculate the number of students failing to complete high school with a diploma for every school system in the country.
The U.S. public education system consists of roughly 14,000 regular school districts, about 11,000 of which serve students at the secondary level and, therefore, produce graduates and dropouts. The research center ranked those 11,000 systems according to the number of dropouts they produce.
The analysis reveals a surprisingly concentrated dropout crisis. Among those school systems,
a mere 25 districts account for one in every five nongraduates for the entire nation, or more than a quarter-million students who fail to graduate. Put another way, those 25 top-ranked systems, in terms of dropouts produced, account for as many nongraduates as the 8,400 lowest-ranked districts combined.
Those epicenters of the dropout crisis are made up of a combination of traditional big-city districts and large countywide school systems. Many of the latter are home to major urban centers.
The New York City public school system, the nation’s largest district, serves 1.1 million students and predictably emerges as the leading source of nongraduates, with nearly 44,000 students slipping away each year. Despite its smaller size, the 678,000-student Los Angeles Unified generates a comparable number of dropouts, owing to a graduation rate 14 points lower than in New York City. Ranked third in the nation is Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas. Chicago and Miami-Dade County, Fla., round out the top five.
