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February 25, 2004
By Gary
Orfield ,
Daniel losen, Johanna
Wald
and Christopher B. Swanson
Every year, across the country, a dangerously high
percentage of students—disproportionately poor and minority—disappear
from the educational pipeline before graduating from high school.
Nationally, only about 68 percent of all students who enter 9th
grade will graduate “on time” with regular diplomas
in 12th grade. While the graduation rate for white students is 75
percent, only approximately half of Black, Hispanic , and Native
American students earn regular diplomas alongside their classmates.
Graduation rates are even lower for minority males. Yet, because
of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation
rates, the public remains largely unaware of this educational and
civil rights crisis.
Recently, Congress took a first step in recognizing
the severity of the dropout problem by including graduation rate
accountability provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),
enacted in 2002. Unfortunately, the Department of Education has
issued regulations that allow schools, districts, and states to
all but eliminate graduation rate accountability for minority subgroups.
By doing so, Department officials have rendered these accountability
measures virtually meaningless..
The implications for individuals, communities, and
the economic vitality of this country are far-reaching and devastating.
High school dropouts are far more likely to be unemployed, in prison,
and living in poverty. Many studies estimate significant losses
in earnings and taxes with economic and societal effects that last
generations.
Our goal in issuing this report is to raise public
awareness of the issue, and to make improving high school graduation
rates a more central component of national educational reform efforts.
We believe that the first step must entail highlighting the severe
racial disparities in high school graduation rates that exist at
the school and district levels.
Because that goal has been impeded in the past by
grossly inaccurate and misleading official dropout data, this report
spells out in some detail how we arrived at our figures, and why
we assert that the methods we used provide far more accurate information
than is currently officially reported by both the federal government
and by most states. This analysis draws on the expertise of Dr.
Christopher Swanson of the non-partisan The Urban Institute, one
of the nation’s leading experts on enrollment and graduation
rate data. As co-author, Dr. Swanson calculated the graduation rates
employed throughout the report using the “Cumulative Promotion
Index” (CPI). CPI is a method he independently developed and
tested to provide more accurate graduation rate estimates.
The report combines findings of a comprehensive review
of graduation rate accountability derived from each state’s
website, along with interviews of state education officials. Finally,
the report provides recommendations on how both the federal government
and individual states can act to address this crisis.
Woven throughout this report are narratives about
students who have either dropped out or felt “pushed”
out of school, often due to the pressure experienced by officials
to raise their schools’ overall test profiles. Collectively,
these stories highlight the critical need to provide individual
schools and school districts with positive incentives to hold onto
more students through graduation.
NOTE:
The following files are available for download in PDF Format ( )
and might take a while to download. Please allow a couple of minutes
for them to appear on your screen.
To view the COMPLETE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY click
below:
Losing Our
Future: How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind by the Graduation
Rate Crisis
To view the FULL REPORT click below:
Losing Our Future:
How Minority Youth are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate
Crisis
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