Last week the news media seemed unable to stop talking about America’s dropout crisis. So what is this all about, and why all the sudden attention?
Well last week the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center with support from the America’s Promise Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, released a report called Cities in Crisis, which explored the dropout issue with a specific focus on the graduation rates of America’s 50 largest cities. The study found that overall, graduation rates are significantly lower in the largest US cities, and further, that large disparities exist in some of our country’s largest metro areas, where students in a suburban school system may be twice as likely as their urban counterparts to graduate from high school. When EPE employed its own method of calculating the dropout rate, they found that only 52% of students from the largest districts in the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma, a rate well below the national graduation rate of 70%. How does this play out in the Commonwealth? read more »
