Dive Brief:

• To reach the goal of having a 90% national high school graduation rate by 2020 set forth by the America’s Promise Alliance, the current rate of progress must double.
• The most recent "Building a Grad Nation" report, released Wednesday, found that though the national graduation rate in 2015 hit a record-high 83.2%, efforts to meet the goal have been tempered by slowing progress, persistent gaps and attainment inequities, and questions over the validity of reporting.
• Perhaps the most promising statistics were around the "remarkable turnarounds" in cities, which were previously thought to be impervious to any real efforts toward progress — but post-industrial areas, particularly in New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, continue to struggle with low graduation rates.

Dive Insight:

While significant progress has been made — an 83.2% national graduation rate is a record certainly worth celebrating — gaps persist for students of color, low-income students, English language learners and students with disabilities. Concerted efforts must be made to better serve these students, who are increasingly the majority population. One point of promise, however, is that even as students are increasingly of color and fewer are coming from high-income households, college enrollment is up 10%, and college preparedness remained flat in the last five years.

This progress with students who would have been part of the No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top ed reform eras is encouraging to equity advocates, but progress has stalled since 2012. In fact, all data indicates that students who are in the 1st-10th grades now are "the ones to worry about," said Bridgeland and Balfanz, who presented the report and found "these students are not even close; they're a distance away from being college-ready." 

The number of "dropout factories" dropped significantly between 2002 and 2015 — from 2,007 to 954. However, there is some concern by the report's researchers that the rise of for-profit alt schools has artificially inflated the numbers by shifting students who are struggling in district schools to these alternative institutions where outcomes are not tracked in the same federal data sets.

As is the case with for-profit higher ed, said Civic Enterprises CEO John Bridgeland and Johns Hopkins University's Everyone Graduates Center Director Robert Balfanz, the financial incentive to enroll as many students as possible sometimes leads to lower student outcomes. The data does quell concerns that the standards for graduation may have declined to artificially boost graduation rates, finding standards have remained flat or even increased across the board.