Aggressive efforts to prevent students from dropping out contributed to a modest increase of 3.5 percentage points nationally in the high school graduation rate from 2001 to 2009, according to presented last week at the Grad Nation summit in Washington.
The children鈥檚 advocacy group America鈥檚 Promise Alliance, founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, organized the event.
The four-year graduation rate was 75 percent in 2009, meaning one in four students failed to get a diploma in four years, researchers found. That鈥檚 well below the organization鈥檚 goal of 90 percent by 2020.
Researchers found that the number of 鈥渄ropout factories,鈥� schools that fail to graduate more than 60 percent of students on time, had fallen by more than 450 between 2002 and 2010, but that 1,550 remain.
鈥淏ig gains are possible if you work hard at it, and if you don鈥檛 focus on it, you鈥檙e going to go backward,鈥� said Robert Balfanz, a report author and the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which tracks the data.
The increase in graduation rates was primarily the result of growth in 12 states, with New York and Tennessee showing double-digit gains since 2002, according to the research. Ten states had declines: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Utah.
It鈥檚 estimated that high school graduates will earn $130,000 more over their lifetimes than dropouts and that high school graduates will generate more than $200,000 in higher tax revenues and savings in government expenditures over their lifetime, the report says.
