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30 Percent of Students Won't Get Diplomas

Posted on: Wednesday, 21 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Ignazio Messina, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio

Jun. 21--An estimated 1.2 million American high school students, most of whom are minorities, will not graduate with their classmates, according to a national analysis released yesterday.

That figure represents about 30 percent of the class of 2006.

"Our research paints a much starker picture of the challenges we face in high school graduation," said Christopher B. Swanson, research center director of Editorial Projects in Education, which conducted the report with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"When 30 percent of our ninth graders fail to finish high school with a diploma, we are dealing with a crisis that has frightening implications for our country's future," he said.

In Ohio, 76.5 percent of students received a diploma in the 2002-2003 school year, the most recent data available.

But black students in the state graduated at a much lower rate.

The report said less than 51 percent of African-American students graduated. When broken down by gender and race, less than 45 percent of black males graduated.

The Toledo Public Schools graduation rate for 2004-05 was 80.2 percent, according to data issued by the district yesterday.

"It was really good news, and we were really happy about that," said Jan Kilbride, TPS assistant superintendent of high schools.

"I think we are doing a number of different initiatives ... and we offer more ways for students to acquire credits," she said.

The district's rate has been increasing steadily. It was 76.6 percent for the 2003-04 school year, and 70.4 for the 2002-03 academic year.

In Michigan, the overall graduation rate was 66.4 for the 2002-03 school year.

Black students also graduated at a much lower rate in that state. The report said less than 32 percent of African-American students in Michigan graduated. When broken down by gender and race, only 26 percent of black males graduated.

Nationally, about seven in 10 students graduate from high school with a regular diploma. But about half of native American and black students graduate, compared with more than three-quarters of non-Hispanic whites and Asians.

The Hispanic graduation rate is 55.6 percent.

The report also said male students are consistently less likely to graduate than females -- a pattern that holds true across every racial and ethnic group examined.

The report found that graduation rates vary widely across the nation's largest districts, from a high of 82.5 percent in Fairfax County, Virginia, the nation's 14th largest district, to a low of 21.7 percent in the Detroit Public Schools, the nation's 11th largest district.

On average, 60 percent of all students in urban districts graduate from high school, a rate 10 percentage points lower than the national average and nearly 15 percentage points lower than the suburban average.

Contact Ignazio Messina at: imessina@theblade.com or 419-724-6171.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Blade

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