dropout statistics

Off-track for graduation after failing a world history course, Kareem Bennett was on his way to being a statistic.

The U.S. Department of Education has announced that starting this summer it will be reporting and collecting graduation rate data on a rigorous, uniform basis. States will no longer have differing ways to calculate graduation data in an effort for greater uniformity and transparency in those calculations.

  By fourth grade, the average reading score of African American and Latino students is two years below grade level. And by the age of 17, the average reading and math scores of African American and Latino students are equivalent to a 13-year-old white child. 

  Those are some of the hard facts shared by Lourdez Ferrer and Stephen Garlington of the DuPage Regional Office of Education in Wheaton, Ill. during a session dedicated to reducing Latino and African American dropout rates on Monday.  

A typically overlooked corner of the dropout problem became a little more visible Thursday when state officials for the first time released the dropout rate for eighth-graders, the LA Times reported this week.

Starting this school year, Texas parents must submit a signed statement saying that a withdrawing student intends to study at home. 

The new regulation will close a Lone Star loophole that many believe has been used to hide dropouts.

A new national report from Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center finds that the nation’s graduation rate has increased significantly, following two consecutive years of declines and stagnation.

With the dramatic turnaround, the nation’s graduation rate stands at 72 percent — the highest level of high school completion in more than two decades, according to the report. 

Let's say your local high school reports a graduation rate of  70 percent and a dropout rate of 3 percent.

Confused by the seemingly ignored 27 percent of students who didn't graduate and didn't drop out? You're not alone.

Graduation and dropout rates can be confusing — and for some, these numbers will only become more confusing as more rigorous graduation requirements take hold nationwide. 

You can read a new report from the America's Promise Alliance in two ways.

First, the glass-half-full approach: The number of high schools that fall into the alliance's definition of "dropout factories" fell by more than 6 percent from 2008 to 2009.

And then, the glass-half-empty take: 1,634 schools still fail to graduate more than six out of every 10 students. 

Something is happening in Baltimore — and it's saving lives.

Since 2006, the number of children killed in the city has plunged by 80 percent, and the number of juveniles suspected in killings has dropped by about the same percentage.

Those and other juvenile crime statistics run counter to decades of conventional wisdom that suggests that crime increases during bad economies. So what's going on?

Is it better policing? Stricter gang enforcement? Community-based support networks for at-risk youth?

The graduation rate for high school students in Alaska’s capital dropped by 7 percent 2009-2010 from the previous year, according to a student achievement report presented recently at a Juneau School District board meeting.