Big-city schools graduate little more than half of their students in four years, concludes a new study by America’s Promise Alliance.
In most cases, the surrounding suburbs do much better: While the graduation rate is 34.6 percent for urban Baltimore students, it’s 81.5 percent for suburban students. The alliance is focusing on the urban-suburban gap, but I think the raw numbers are more important. If a city is surrounded by wealthy, high-education suburbs, it may never catch up in graduation rates, but it ought to be able to get more than half its students to a diploma on time.
Here are four-year graduation rates in the 50 largest districts. In San Jose, Nashville and Mesa (Arizona), 77 percent of students earn a diploma in four years, very close to the suburban average. At the bottom of the list, only one in four Detroit students completes high school on time; it’s one in three in Indianapolis, Cleveland and Baltimore.
In conjunction with the report, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the federal government will require states and school districts to use the same method to report graduation rates with data for subgroups. No more playing games with the numbers. This is a step forward. We also need systems that track individual students so we can figure out how many of the non-grads earned a diploma in five years or a GED.
Why are you labeling San Jose urban? As far as I’m aware, it’s still rather urban at the San Jose end but very suburban at the Gunderson/Leland end, and the magnet programs at San Jose & Lincoln are a bit unusual and draw in a fair-sized suburban group. Did I miss some major demographic shift?
San Jose is a major city and San Jose Unified is considered an urban school district. The magnet programs don’t draw in many out-of-district students, but there are a significant number of middle-class white and Asian students living in the south end of the district.
Detroit! Number! One!
Detroit! Number! One!
The state may be imploding, Detroit’s mayor may be getting measured for an orange jumpsuit, the roads may look like a World War I battlefield but by gosh we do know how to waste tax payer’s money and children’s lives with the best of ‘em.
Just to be picky, that’s not a list of the 50 largest districts, rather of the districts that include the 50 largest cities. How do I know? I just went through new-teacher orientation for a magnet-school job in Raleigh and they told me that Wake County (Raleigh + suburbs + nearby small towns + quite a few farms) is now the largest school system in North Carolina, having passed Charlotte, though Charlotte is still a larger city. I assume that means that some (most?) of Charlotte’s suburbs are in separate counties, though I’m too lazy to check a map.
They also told me that Wake County has the second-highest graduation rate for comparable (= large) districts, after Fairfax County, Virginia, but said that that’s nothing to brag about, because it’s still only 80%.