High School Graduation Rates

Education Must Increase High School Graduation Rates Along with Reading, Math and Science Scores
By Leanne Hoagland-Smith

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education act regardless of whether you like or hate it has accomplished at least one thing right by forcing school districts to report accurate graduation rates. Given the billions of dollars invested in public education through the taxation (income and personal property) along with the enormous amount of research again much of which is funded by taxpayers' dollars, a reasonable personal would think that high school graduation rates should be no lower than 90%. However, many U.S. taxpayers are reading about graduation rates of 30% to 60% within their respective communities.

For example, the Indianapolis Star in November of 2006 attempted to lessen the outrage from the poor results being achieved through taxpayers' dollars when reporting current high school graduation rates. The new formula courtesy of NCLB places the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) graduate rate at 48%. This much more accurate Indiana graduation rate reflects earlier findings from the Indiana Government Efficiency Commission. In 2004 the Commission reported:

• Of every 100 Indiana 9th graders, only 68 graduate from high school, 41 go on to post-secondary education, 31 persist to their second year and 21 graduate within six years.

Nationally, in June of 2006, the Editorial Projects in Education (ED) Research Center projected that 1 in 3 high school students in the Class of 2006 will not graduate in 2006. This report painted a bleaker picture for urban school districts from 21.7% in Detroit to 43.8% in Cleveland from the 2002-03 year. Even the best high school districts such as Fairfax County Va and Wake Conty N.C. graduated only 82% of their students during this same time frame.