U.S. on Pace to Reach Record 90 Percent High School Graduation Rate by 2020

For the first time in decades, the United States is making steady gains in the number of high school students earning diplomas, putting it on pace to reach a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020, according to a new analysis released Monday.

But the good news comes with a big asterisk: students with learning disabilities and limited fluency in English face long odds to finish high school, with graduation rates for those groups as low as 25 percent in some states, the analysis found.

Minority students also continue to fall well behind their white peers, with about one-third of African-American students and 29 percent of Hispanic students dropping out before graduation.

The ‘Building a Grad Nation’ report — which was co-authored by Robert Balfanz, a leading scholar of dropout rates at Johns Hopkins University — found strong improvements in graduation rates in a diverse collection of states including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alaska, California, Texas and New York. The national graduation rate jumped from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, with the pace of improvement accelerating in the past few years.

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Iowa, Vermont and Wisconsin lead the nation with graduation rates close to 90 percent, according to the report, which used data from 2010 and 2011. At the bottom of the heap: Nevada and New Mexico, where barely six in 10 high school freshmen can expect to earn a diploma within four years. Idaho, Kentucky and Oklahoma didn’t use the same formula for calculating rates as other states and thus were not included in the report.

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Yet the report’s authors warn that the momentum could still stall.

Nearly every state will soon be rolling out curricula tied to the Common Core standards, which aim to bring more rigor to math and language arts instruction. Many will require students to pass exams tied to those higher standards to graduate, which could push lead to more failures and higher drop-out rates, the report suggests.

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Perhaps the biggest threat to momentum, however, is the lagging performance of disadvantaged students, the report’s authors said.

In Nevada, for instance, just 23 percent of students with disabilities, 29 percent of those with limited English skills and 43 percent of African-American students earned their diplomas in 2011.

Even generally high-performing states such Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Connecticut have strikingly poor records with some minority students. Minnesota has the biggest gaps: The graduation rate for African-American and Hispanic students hovered around 50 percent in 2011, compared to 84 percent for white students.

‘We need to look at these disparities head on,’ said Brenda Cassellius, Minnesota’s Education Commissioner.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat, has proposed $640 million in new education funding, including an effort to better integrate schools in hopes of boosting performance for minority students, Cassellius said.

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