Are graduation rates telling the real story?


  • December 18, 2015
  • /   Reggie Dogan
  • /   education

The New Year is a couple weeks away but national education leaders already are celebrating.

With the 2014 national graduation rate at an all-time high of 82 percent, the new milestone has the U.S. Department of Education in a festive mood.

Hold off on popping the champagne, says a leading organization pushing to improve outcomes and opportunities for high school students.

The GradNation campaign called the recently released graduation rates “sobering,” saying the numbers don’t paint the real picture.

The reason: The national rate of 82 percent is still a few tenths of a percent short of being on track for meeting the campaign’s goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by the year 2020.

And there still are significant gaps in the performance of black and Hispanic students, students from low-income families, and English-language learners, according to The Atlantic

In today’s high-tech, information-driven society, the high school graduation rate is used as a barometer of the health of a community and the skill of its future workforce.

That’s why the Studer Community Institute includes the high school graduation rate among its 16 benchmark metrics in the Pensacola Metro Dashboard.

Developed with the University of West Florida, the dashboard is a snapshot of the educational, economic and social well-being of the community.

The Class of 2015 graduation rate for schools in Florida will be released in a few weeks by the state Department of Education. National graduation rates typically are always released a year behind state figures.

Florida’s 2014 graduation rate at 76 percent ranked 43rd out of 50 states and the District of Columbia.

At 82.8 percent, Santa Rosa County School District’s graduation rate ranks higher than the state and nearly mirrors the national rate.

At 66.1 percent, Escambia County’s graduation falls below the state and national rates, ranking 57th out of 67 Florida school districts.

Since 2002, states and school districts have been under enormous pressure to increase their graduation rates.

As NPR’s education team reported, the graduation rates should be taken with a grain of salt. In too many cases, districts are fudging on numbers by moving students out of traditional classrooms to hide their poor achievement, while others have made it easier to get a diploma.

In, “High School Graduation Rates: The Good, The Bad, and The Ambiguous,” NPR found states, cities and districts using a range of strategies to improve the graduation rate:

— Some are mislabeling students or finding ways of moving them off the books. In Chicago, the district misclassified hundreds of students who enrolled in its alternative schools.

— Schools in Detroit and Camden, N.J., made it easier to get a diploma. In all, 21 states offer alternative, sometimes much easier, paths to graduation.

— In Des Moines, Iowa, and suburban Atlanta, NPR discovered schools working hard and actually giving students the long-term support needed to accurately raise the graduation rate.

In the midst of celebrating a milestone graduation rate, is it fair to ask whether the higher rates are the result of higher student achievement or states lowering the bar for earning a diploma?

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