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Old 10-20-2009, 01:04 PM
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Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates


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By SAM DILLON
Published: April 22, 2009

It is no surprise that more students drop out of high school in big cities than elsewhere. Now, however, a nationwide study shows the magnitude of the gap: the average high school graduation rate in the nation’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.

But that urban-suburban gap, which in part is due to hundreds of failing city schools that some researchers call dropout factories, was far wider in some areas.

In Cleveland, for instance, where the gap was largest, only 38 percent of high school freshmen graduated within four years, compared with 80 percent in the Cleveland suburbs, the report said. In Baltimore, which has the nation’s second-largest gap, 41 percent of students graduate from city schools, compared with 81 percent in the suburbs.

New York also had a large gap, with 54 percent of freshmen graduating within four years from schools in the city, compared with 83 percent from suburban high schools.

The report, titled Closing the Graduation Gap, was commissioned by the America’s Promise Alliance, a nonprofit group that works to reduce the nation’s dropout rate. The alliance is headed by Alma Powell and her husband, Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.

The graduation rates cited in the report were for the class of 2005, the most recent year for which Department of Education data were available, said Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, the Maryland-based group that produced the study. The report builds on research begun in a previous study released a year ago.

Some big city school districts that have worked to improve their graduation rates have made significant progress since the middle of the last decade, Dr. Swanson said. Philadelphia public schools, for instance, raised the graduation rate to 62 percent in 2005 from 39 percent in 1995, the report said.

As a whole, the nation’s graduation rate improved by a few percentage points over the same decade, to 71 percent from 66 percent, the study said.

But Marguerite Kondracke, the executive director of the alliance, said the pace of progress remained disappointing.

“We don’t have time as a nation for incremental change,” Ms. Kondracke said. “Just over half the students in our big cities are graduating from high school, and that’s unacceptable.”

For decades, high school graduation rates were routinely overstated in official statistics, with the Department of Education putting the nation’s rate above 80 percent and some states reporting rates above 90 percent. Behind the false data were a host of faulty reporting methods, including labeling dropouts who obtained G.E.D. certificates as graduates.

The No Child Left Behind law signed in 2002 did little to improve the problem, allowing states to use dozens of different reporting methods. New Mexico, for example, was allowed to define its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma, a method that grossly undercounted dropouts by ignoring all students who left school before 12th grade.

In 2005, the Department of Education joined a trend toward standardization by publishing an official federal estimate of state graduation rates, and governors agreed to adopt a uniform calculation method. In one of her last official acts last year, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings ordered states to calculate their graduation rates using the formula the governors had agreed upon by 2013.

Several provisions of the economic stimulus law signed in February may help improve graduation rates, including one that requires states to ensure that all schools, city or suburban, rich or poor, have equal access to qualified teachers, Ms. Kondracke said.

“This urban-suburban graduation gap has developed partly because teacher quality is not the same from classroom to classroom,” she said. “So improving teacher quality is crucial to raising graduation rates in these inner-city schools.”

The study found that the Indianapolis public schools had the lowest graduation rate of any large American city in 2005, with only 30 percent of freshmen graduating on time. Several large Western cities, in contrast, had graduation rates that exceeded the national average. The Mesa Unified District in Arizona had the highest graduation rate of any large city, with 77 out of every 100 freshmen there graduating four years later, the study found.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/ed...22dropout.html
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