By Jim Brown
A new study finds that nearly one-third of American students do not complete high school, and many who do graduate are unprepared for college.
The report, compiled by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is called “Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States.” Lead author Dr. Jay Greene estimates that as many as one million high school students — about 30% of those who enter the ninth grade — do not graduate from high school.
Although the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) puts the national graduation rate at more than 86%, Greene says that figure is misleading. He says the DOE counts among high school completers those students who received the GED, or General Equivalency Diploma, also known as the General Educational Development certificate.
Greene says the Institute's report does not count GED recipients as high school completers for two good reasons. “First, GED recipients, properly speaking, are dropouts from high school who later go on to get a certificate. So if we want to know how our high schools are doing, we don't want to count these students who drop out and later get a GED on their own initiative as a success for the high school system,” he says.
Another reason Greene says the study did not include these students in the graduates category is that research has shown the life outcomes of GED recipients to be very similar to those of high school dropouts.
The study also found that barely more than half of African-American and Hispanic students graduate from high school. And the Institute's senior fellow estimates that only 20% of African-American students and 16% of Hispanic students leave high school adequately prepared for college.
“Clearly we are not reaching these students successfully. While some of these difficulties have to do with problems outside of the school, for the amount of money we devote to education, I think we could expect schools to be doing a better job than just graduating half of their minority students,” Greene says.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
