High School Graduation Rates

Posted on June 13, 2011 by townsend

• Uptick in Kentucky high school dropout rate helps fuel debate on raising age, By Mike Wynn, June 12, 2011, Louisville Courier-Journal: “Kentucky’s high school dropout rate edged up last year as lawmakers continue to spar over ways to make sure more students graduate. The Kentucky Department of Education reported recently that the statewide dropout rate increased from 2.89 percent in 2009 to 3.19 percent in 2010, marking the eighth consecutive year that the rate has hovered around 3 percent. While enrollment dipped 0.6 percent from 2009 – to slightly more than 195,000 – the number of students who quit school between the ninth and 12th grade rose from 5,673 to 6,225, an increase of nearly 10 percent. Legislators have debated raising the minimum dropout age for years. Doing so, proponents say, would help bring those numbers down and should be coupled with alternative education programs…”
• State leads U.S. with 90.7% graduation rate, By Cindy Hodgson, June 11, 2011, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter: “Wisconsin has one of the highest graduation rates in the country – the highest, according to one method of calculation – and many of the school districts in Manitowoc County have even higher rates than the state. A report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows Wisconsin leading the nation with a graduation rate of 90.7 percent, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Wisconsin has been first or second in each of the last five years in that report, which uses the Public High School Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate from the Common Core of Data at the U.S. Department of Education, according to a news release from the DPI. Two other methods of calculation, which also provide results for individual districts, put the state’s graduation rate a bit lower…”