Maureen Downey, education editorial writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote a piece about graduation rates in yesterday’s edition entitled Can’t throw up our hands as teens quit. According to Downey about 90,000 students will graduate from Georgia’s secondary schools this month, but there are another 49,000 teens who should have part of this year’s graduation class. These 49,000 dropped out since entering 9th grade four years ago. The Georgia Department of Education disputes these figures, and indicates that the graduation rate is 75% compared to 63% just six years ago. Downey indicates that the Department of Education uses a counting methodology that ignores many students who really dropped out (the State indicates that many of these students moved). The State also adds into the equation students who pass the GED at a later time. Downey suggests that the actual graduation rate is closer to 60%.

In data provided by The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the 2006 graduation rate in Georgia was 55.9. According to their data, there were 131543 enrolled in the 9th grade in 2002. Of these, only 73498 graduated from high school four years later.

The US average graduation rate, according to data by the Center, is 66.6%, and ranges from 86.3% (New Jersey) to 50.5% (Nevada). Here is a map showing the range of rates by state. Click on the map, and it will bring you to the The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems website.

Map of USA showing graduation rates in each of the states.

And these averages disguise more serious discrepancies that exist when you compare drop out rates amongst African-American, Hispanic and white students. According to some data, less than 40% of African-American and Hispanic students graduate from high school in Georgia. When major cities are compared, the data shows the in the major 50 US cities, many of them report graduation rates is below 50%, and in some cities it approaches 25%.

According to America’s Promise Alliance (which provided the data cited above), more than 1.2 million students drop out of school each year. This is an enormous number of teens dropping out of school, and one that is hard to believe. Follow the link above to the Alliance website to find out who are the leaders of the group, and what they are doing to try and reduce the number of students who drop out of school.

The rate at which students do NOT graduate from our schools is a dilemma that just won’t go away. How can this be turned around? What programs are working that seem to increase the number of students who typically wouldn’t have graduated?