National High School Graduation Rate Falls Below 70%
Diplomas Count 2009 Finds Rate Fell Nearly 1.5 Percentage Points
From 1996 to 2005, the national high school graduation rate increased from 66.4 percent in 1996 to 70.6. However, from 2005 to 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, the rate fell by 1.4 percentage points. The decrease for the Class of 2006 marks the first significant annual decline in more than a decade, according to an analysis of high school completion by the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center, which recently published its findings in Diplomas Count 2009.
“As a nation, we have a long way to go in order to reconcile the goal of raising college attendance and completion rates with troubling data on the proportion of U.S. students who graduate from high schools in the traditional four-year time span,” said EPE Research Center Director Christopher B. Swanson. “The rates are generally not as high as we would like them to be, and the pace of improvement needs to be much faster.”
Diplomas Count 2009, data on state and school district graduation rates, and EdWeek Maps, which allows users to zoom in on states and access detailed data for every school district and high school in the nation, are available at http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/06/11/index.html
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