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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
We’re 49th! We’re 49th!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia is again near the bottom of a report on the state of education.
A study released today by the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute puts the Georgia’s graduation rate at just 56 percent.
That’s 49th in the nation, based on 2002 data, one notch above our familiar foe South Carolina. (Georgia has swapped last-place dishonors with South Carolina in SAT scores in recent years.)
Our graduation rate for white students is 62 percent. For black students, it’s just 48 percent.
Nationally, the graduation rate is 72 percent for public-school students leaving high school with a regular diploma. New Jersey is #1 with 89 percent graduating. Iowa, Wisconsin and North Dakota give out diplomas to 85 percent of their students.
Graduation rates are hard to track, and previous statistics looking at dropout rates have been misleading. Educators have debated whether to code kids sent to prison as dropouts. After all, they have access to education on the inside. (There’s some glass-is-half-full reasoning!) Some kids go from high school to a GED program. Are they dropouts? (I say yes, but that’s just me.)
Anyway, the new thinking is to focus on graduation rates. Numbers crunchers simply ask: How many kids did you have in ninth grade and how many actually graduated?
The next question we need to ask in Georgia: So where are almost half our young people?
