New report: Dropout rates five times higher for poor students
Graph from the NCES report
Sen. Tom Harkin’s ( D-Iowa) new proposal to reform No Child Left Behind is the latest attempt by policy makers to fix the country’s “dropout factories,” identified in the bill as schools with lower than a 60-percent graduation rate. But a new report has found a silver lining amid the crisis: The number of dropouts is already on the decline.
A new National Center for Education Statisticsreport on dropout rates has found that while there has been an overall decline in dropouts since 1972, there are still 3 million students between the ages of 16 and 24 without a high school diploma, a disproportionate number of whom are minority and poor.
According to the report, the “event dropout rate,” which estimates the percentage of high school
