Stats That Stick: June 13, 2012

Time for those Stats That Stick! Here are a few of the statistics we’ve seen in the past week that deserve your attention!

High school graduation rate of the class of 2009: 73 percent.

U.S. News and World Report examines Education Week’s  “Diplomas Count2012,” which was released last week. This edition of the annual report focuses on the achievement of Latino students. From 2008 to 2009, Latino graduation rates increased by 5.5 percent, which helped to spur a 1.7 percent increase in the overall national graduation rate.

Afternoon Announcements: June 13, 2012

Ah, Wednesday, and since it’s past 1pm, well, on the east coast at least, it means you’re halfway through the work week. What will come of the remaining 2.5 days of your work week? Promotion? Rainstorm? ESEA reauthorization? Who can say, really? What we do know is that there are some education policy tidbits for you this afternoon. High School Soup’s Daily Announcements: Consistency in an Inconsistent Education World.

The Senate subcommittee that oversees education spending passed a bill that would increase the U.S. Department of Education’s budget by $400 million to $68.5 billion. Education Week has the report here. Increases would be made to school districts’ Title I allocations as well as special education state grants. The bill passed on an unsurprising party line vote 10-7.

Good News On Graduation Rates…With a Caution Flag

It’s early June and that means that the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center has released its latest edition of Diplomas Count—an independent source for high school graduation rate estimates that the Alliance and many other organizations rely on for comparable calculations across states and districts.

The news this year is quite good: the national graduation rate has increased to nearly 72 percent compared to 69 percent last year and 66 percent ten years ago. Even better, the graduation rates for each student subgroup have also improved over last year.

Of course, the good news comes with some bad. The graduation rates of American Indian (54 percent), Hispanic (58 percent), and black (57 percent) students still remain under 60 percent and far below those of their white (78 percent) and Asian (83 percent) peers.

Nevertheless, the results are a shot in the arm for education reform advocates who are struggling to beat the drum for reform policies in a new era of fiscal austerity and often find themselves facing the tough question “why should we invest in education when several decades of reform have not moved the needle?”