Education Week - December 13, 2017 - 14

What's Behind Rising U.S. Graduation Improvements?
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

the new data from the National
Center for Education Statistics.
The rate measures the proportion
of each freshman class that earns
a diploma four years later.
"The improvements shown are
encouraging. Every high school
graduation is an important milestone worthy of celebration. But it's
important to remember graduation
is but another step in a lifelong journey," said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in a tweet a day
after the results were released.
It was a much more subdued reaction than the response in prior years
to rising graduation rates. President
Barack Obama and his longest-serving education secretary, Arne Duncan, used rising graduation rates to
make the case that the administration's policies-including new resources and turnaround approaches
for struggling schools-had a positive
impact on student achievement. By
contrast, DeVos has focused on the
need to create private school choice.
Diane Stark Rentner, the deputy
director of the Center on Education
Policy, a Washington think tank,
suggested the rising graduation rate
could be due in part to the Obamaera focus on boosting graduation
rates as part of state waivers to
NCLB's accountability rules.
But Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham In-

GROWTH IN NATION'S GRADUATION RATES
Nationwide, the graduation rate hit another record high this past school year, new federal data show.
More significantly, the rates rose for every major demographic subgroup in 2015-16.

Student Population Overall
American Indian/Alaska Native
Asian/Pacific Islander
Hispanic
Black
White
Low-Income Students
English-Learners
Students with Disabilities

stitute, which studies academic standards and accountability, suggested
NCLB-era accountability itself could
explain the gains, adding, "there is a
plausible case to be made that the
education system is doing a better
job for more of these kids, especially
for disadvantaged subgroups."

Group Gains
The graduation rates for black
students and for students who are
learning English each rose 1.8 percentage points in one year. The rates
for low-income students and Hispanic students each rose 1.5 points
since the previous year. Students

2010-11

2011-12

2012-13

79%
65
87
71
67
84
70
57
59

80%
67
88
73
69
86
72
59
61

81%
70
89
75
71
87
73
61
62

2013-14

82%
70
89
76
73
87
75
63
63

with disabilities saw a gain of nearly
a full percentage point.
But stubborn gaps remain.
"Although students of color and
low-income students are graduating
at higher rates, we must be mindful that there are still significant
gaps for historically underserved
students which translate into lost
potential for our communities and
our country," said John B. King, Jr.,
a former education secretary under
Obama and the current president
and CEO of the Education Trust.
For example, Arkansas, Iowa, and
West Virginia-all states with relatively small populations of Englishlearners-had graduation rates for

2014-15

2015-2016

Change from
2010-11 to 2015-16

83%
72
90
78
75
88
76
65
65

84%
72
91
79
76
88
78
67
66

5%
7
4
8
9
4
8
10
7

English-learners that topped 80 percent, and in California, the state with
the largest K-12 ELL enrollment,
72 percent of English-learners in the
class of 2016 graduated in four years.
That marks a 7 percent increase over
the past two years.
But a number of states fell well
below the national average, including six that had less than half of
their ELL students graduate on
time. That group includes New York,
which has the fourth-highest ELL
enrollment in the nation.
And while Native American high
school graduation rates have increased by 7 percent in the past five
years, the numbers remain "problematic," said Susan Faircloth, a
professor of educational leadership
at the University of North Carolina,
Wilmington, and an enrolled member of the Coharie Tribe. Native
Americans nationwide still have
the lowest graduation rates of any
racial subgroup.

State Improvements Vary

leaders.edweek.org

MEET
Joseph
Meloche
SUPERINTENDENT
Cherry Hill Public Schools
Cherry Hill, N.J.

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 13, 2017 | www.edweek.org

Get a sneak peek
at the new
Leaders for
our 2018 season
Superintendent
Joseph Meloche
regularly turns to
students to inform
his decisionmaking in
the Cherry Hill, N.J.,
school district.

John Bridgeland, the chief executive officer at Civic Enterprises, which
works with several other groups to
monitor and report on the high school
graduation rate in its annual "Building a Grad Nation" report, said the
new high point is a result of "a sustained and aggressive focus" on the
issue in the last decade. But, he added,
good national graduation rates can
also camouflage wide variations.
Iowa led the nation, with 91.3 percent of the class of 2016 graduating.
West Virginia, in the top three with
89.9 percent graduating, also showed
the fastest growth: 3.3 percentage
points in the last year, and 12 percentage points since 2010-11.
Since 2008, West Virginia has,
among other initiatives, raised its
mandatory schooling age from 16 to
17, funded special education "graduation counselors" to keep students on
track, and created a statewide earlywarning system to spot students at
risk of dropping out as early as 1st
grade.
"A lot of it was a change in culture,
identifying those students early
based on attendance and being proactive before it got to the point where
[students] felt they couldn't be successful and wanted to drop out," said
Michele Blatt, the assistant superintendent of the division of support and

By the numbers: Interact
with our online charts to
see how graduation rates
have changed over time
for different student
population groups and
for every state.

www.edweek.org/go/
gradrates

SOURCE: Education Week
Research Center analysis
of NCES data, 2017

accountability for the state education
department.
Every state has shown graduation
gains since the class of 2011 except
Wyoming, which has held steady
since then-but 10 states saw a decline from the class of 2015 to the
class of 2016.
Fordham's Petrilli warned there is
also "reason to be nervous about the
rapid progress" in the graduation
rate, since requirements for diplomas can be "squishy" and some high
schools decide to make themselves
look good by lowering standards.

Are the Gains Real?
Media investigations have found
that some schools improve their
graduation numbers by not counting some low-performing students
in their graduating classes. Others
try to get rid of students who are at
risk of dropping out by encouraging them to transfer to alternative
schools or by using credit-recovery
programs that critics say are less
rigorous than the standard courses.
One recent investigation found
that a school in Washington, D.C.,
graduated half of its students last
year even though they had missed
three months of school-too much to
have earned diplomas.
The most recent "Building a Grad
Nation" report took on the question
of inflated graduation rates, and
concluded it's unlikely the national
graduation rate is inflated. But it
did find evidence that shortcuts
could have pushed the numbers up
in six unnamed states.
The graduation rate of students with disabilities nationwide
rose in the 2015-16 school year, to
66 percent from 64.6 percent the
year before, but other measures of
achievement for special education
students are stagnant, such as the
2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress in math and reading.
"It is tough to reconcile the different stories that these different
measures tell," said Marie O'Hara,
the associate director of policy and
practice for Achieve.
Staff Writers Alyson Klein, Corey
Mitchell, and Christina A. Samuels
contributed to this article, as did
Education Week Research Center
Assistant Director Sterling Lloyd and
Research Analyst Alex Harwin.

http://www.edweek.org/go/gradrates http://leaders.edweek.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - December 13, 2017

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