Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Researchers say 30 percent of those in ninth grade four years ago won't graduate.
By HAROLD GWIN
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- High school graduation rates in Ohio and Pennsylvania are running ahead of the national average.
"Diplomas Count: An Essential Guide to Graduation Policy and Rates" was released Wednesday by EPE Research Center in a special edition of Education Week and shows that the national high school graduation rate in 2002-03, the latest year for which data are available, reached just 69.6 percent.
By comparison, the Ohio graduation rate was at 76.5 percent while, in Pennsylvania, it was 79.1 percent.
Rates across the 50 states and the District of Columbia ranged from a high of 84.5 percent in New Jersey to a low of 52.2 percent in South Carolina.
Christopher B. Swanson, director of EPE Research Center, the research arm of the nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education based in Maryland, said the rates reported in the study are somewhat lower than those reported by the states themselves.
The sources
The study takes its figures from the Common Core Data maintained by the U.S. Department of Education.
States often don't calculate their graduation rates in the same fashion recorded in the Common Core Data, Swanson said.
For example, Ohio reported its 2002-03 graduation rate as 84 percent and Pennsylvania said its rate was 87 percent.
The federal numbers more accurately portray data that are comparable from state to state, he said.
Actual graduation rates are far less than generally acknowledged, said Lynn Olson, executive project editor.
The good news coming out of the study is that educators now know better how to identify children at risk, sometimes as early as the sixth grade, she said.
Females have a higher graduation rate than males with 72.7 of the girls in the 2002-03 class getting their diplomas as compared to only 65.2 percent of the boys.
In Ohio, it was 79.1 percent of the girls and 73 percent of the boys. Comparable data weren't available for Pennsylvania.
The discrepancy was even larger when measured by race.
The study showed that 76.2 percent of white students graduated but only 51.6 percent of black students did so.
In Ohio, the rates were 80.5 percent for white students and 50.7 percent for black students. Pennsylvania showed a graduation rate of 83.2 percent for white students and 57.7 percent for black students.
That 70 percent overall rate determined by the study indicates that more than 1.2 million of the 4 million students who were in the ninth grade four years ago won't be graduating this year, Olson said.
Earning a diploma is a crucial issue for young people. Without it, kids tend to face a bleak future, she said.
The study indicates that only 89 percent of the nation's ninth graders make it to 10th grade and that rate drops to 81 percent in 11th grade and 75 percent in 12th grade, with just 70 percent getting diplomas.
"Our research paints a much starker picture of the challenges we face in high school graduation. When 30 percent of our ninth graders fail to finish high school with a diploma, we are dealing with a crisis that has frightening implications for our country's future," Swanson said.
gwin@vindy.com