Apparently there’s a little confusion about the high school graduation rate in the United States on the part of a Massachusetts senator and former candidate for the presidency of the United States. According to the United Health Foundation the four year high school graduation rate for the United States overall is 68.3%. The state with the lowest four year high school graduation rate is South Carolina and it is the only state with an “on-time” high school graduation rate of 53% or below.
The rate of “on-time” high school graduation has fallen sharply in some states. A casual glance at the statistics suggests that that’s the case in states whose Hispanic populations have risen sharply over the period. I could well be wrong about this: it’s just a hipshot.
The four year high school graduation rate from New York public schools is 54.3%. The four year high school graduation rate from Chicago public schools is 70.1% (I suspect that’s a 7 year graduation rate).
I wonder what the senator was thinking of?
I bet a junior staffer went on the internet and pulled the number from the recent LA Times article http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-dropout29jan29,0,138315,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines and pulled the 53% number out.
Thanks for the link, superdestroyer. That would tend to support my offhand suggestion that the problem was related to large numbers of non-English speakers.
My wife had a classroom of special needs kids in LA 20 years ago. For 10 kids, there were 7 different languages spoken at home. It’s worse now.