Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012 - 25

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Graduation Rate Keeps Climbing; Strong Gains for Latino Students
By Christopher B. swanson
new analysis of high school completion from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center finds that the graduation rate for America’s public schools stands at 72.7 percent for the class of 2009, the most recent year for which data are available. The graduation rate, which has risen a full percentage point from the previous year and nearly 7 percentage points in the past decade, has reached its highest point since the mid-1980s. These results also mark a second consecutive year of solid improvements, following a period of declines and stagnation. The epe Research Center calculates graduation rates for the nation, states, and every public school district in the country using the Cumulative Promotion Index (cpi) method and data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data. While such signs of progress are reason for encouragement, that optimism is tempered by the reality that far too many young people are still failing to complete a high school education. We project that 1.1 million students from this year’s high school class will not graduate with a diploma. That amounts to more than 6,000 students lost each school day, or one student every 28 seconds.

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Similar—if not more dramatic—divides are found between the highest- and lowest-performing states. At the extremes, a 35 percentage-point gap separates New Jersey (graduating 87 percent of students) from the District of Columbia (52 percent). Other national leaders graduating more than 80 percent of their public high school students include: Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Overall, graduation rates in half the states fall within 4 points of the national average of nearly 73 percent. Rates of graduation have also risen in a large majority of states during the past decade. Forty-three states have posted gains ranging from a fraction of a percentage point to 24 points over that period. Among the states that have lost ground, about half saw declines of less than 5 percentage points.

Focus on One Population
Because graduation rates for Latinos lag substantially behind the U.S. average, this group makes up a disproportionate number of the students who do not finish high school. Of the 1.1 million members of the class of 2012 that we project will fail to graduate with a diploma, about 310,000 (or 27 percent) will be Latinos. Two states—California and

Texas—will produce half the nation’s Latino dropouts. The challenges faced by Latino students are largely reflected in—if not directly driven by—the characteristics of the communities in which they live and the school systems by which they are served. Latinos are much more likely than whites to attend districts that are large and highly urbanized, that serve high proportions of Englishlanguage learners, and that struggle with high levels of poverty and racial and socioeconomic segregation. Each of these factors has consistently been linked to significantly lower graduation rates. Since 2009, Diplomas Count has featured a special annual investigation of district performance that seeks to identify school systems that are “overachieving” or beating the odds—that is, producing graduation rates higher than would be expected, based on a detailed profile comprised of 10 distinct characteristics, including size, location, poverty level, and structural features. This analysis attempts to move beyond conventional points of comparison, such as national or state averages, and gauge a district’s performance against other similarly situated systems. This year, the epe Research Center directed its attention to Latino graduation rates in school systems serving
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A Rising Tide for Some Boats
In recent years, graduation trends for the nation as a whole have been consistently mirrored across major racial and ethnic categories, with all groups moving upward or downward together, albeit at varying rates. But, looking beneath the surface of the overall gain posted for the class of 2009, we do not find the expected across-the-board pattern of improvements. Graduation rates for Asian-American, Native American, and white students in the class of 2009 all dropped, from 1 percentage point to more than 2 points. These declines, however, were more than offset by a moderate increase of 1.5 percentage points among African-Americans and an impressive 5-point rise for Latino students. The graduation rates for the latter two groups have seen solid improvement over the past three years. Among the implications of these diverging trajectories is a continued narrowing of the graduation gaps between whites and their African-American and Latino peers. The black-white graduation gap has been reduced by onequarter since 2000, with the Latino-white gap shrinking by one-third. While students from all historically underserved racial and ethnic groups are earning diplomas at higher rates than they did a decade ago, striking disparities remain.

Graduation rate trendinG upward
the nation’s graduation rate continued to climb for the second year in a row and stands at its highest point in more than two decades. solid improvements posted by black and latino students for the class of 2009 more than offset modest year-over-year declines for asian, american indian, and white students.

90 85 80 75 70 65 60 55 50 45
1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

AsiAn 80.4 White 77.6 All students 72.7

lAtino 63.0 blAck 58.5 AmericAn indiAn 53.1

Gaps Persist
Sixty-three percent of Latino students in the class of 2009 graduated, as did 59 percent of African-Americans and 53 percent of Native Americans. Whites and Asian-Americans, the highest-performing groups, graduated at rates of 78 and 80 percent, respectively. Nationwide, 69 percent of male students and 76 percent of female students earned diplomas, a 7 percentage-point gender gap that has remained virtually unchanged for years. High school completion rates for minority males consistently fall between 50 and 60 percent.

sourCe: epe research Center, 2012
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Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012

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