State's high school graduation rate in 'crisis'

By Gracie Bonds Staples and D. Aileen Dodd

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s dismal high school graduation rate has reached a “crisis” level, according to a national report released Wednesday. The authors recommended immediate federal action.

Entitled “Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools,” the report puts Georgia among 17 states with the lowest overall graduation rates in the country.

“The likelihood that any student is assigned to a school where graduation is not the norm is alarmingly high,” said Adria Steinberg, a co-author of the report using 2005-2006 data.

The report was released by the Jobs for the Future advocacy group and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University — a think-tank working to curb dropout rates and promote higher education — to focus attention to a national problem.

Researchers found that one-third of Georgia high schools have low graduation rates and that those 130 schools are not limited to urban areas: 32 are located in cities, 36 are in the suburbs and 37 are in rural areas.

“Improving the state’s graduation rate is the number-one strategic goal for education in our state,” said Dana Tofig, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education. “The good news is we’ve seen improvement over the past several years, but we still have too many kids who are dropping out.”

While high schools with low graduation rates exist in every state and in many communities, they are concentrated in 17 states that produce about 70 percent of the nation’s dropouts, the study found.

Data from those states are being used to develop new analytic tools for examining the characteristics of schools, districts and states that make certain approaches more likely to succeed in certain places.

“The go-it-alone approach of leaving failing schools to fix themselves has not worked,” said co-author Robert Balfanz of the Everyone Graduates Center. “With the federal government ready to invest billions of dollars into turning around low-performing schools, the time is right to form the federal, state and local partnerships needed to transform or replace the low graduation-rate high schools that drive the nation’s dropout crisis.”

Georgia was one of five states with the worst graduation rates. The others are Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and South Carolina.

Overall, Georgia’s rate rose slightly from 75.3 percent to 77.8 percent from 2008 to 2009.

Some schools, not surprisingly, reported significantly lower rates, including some alternative schools.

In Gwinnett County, Phoenix High, an alternative campus, had a 42.6 percent graduation rate. Cobb County’s Oakwood High, an open campus in Marietta attracting students with academic or family issues that make them uncomfortable in traditional learning environments, saw its graduation rate fall from 67.2 percent in 2008 to 55.1 percent in 2009.

A Cobb Schools spokesman said administrators are working to improve student achievement at Oakwood, which failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress in 2009, and other high schools with graduation rates below the state average. “We can’t control transiency, but what we can control is remediation to meet students’ needs,” said Doug Goodwin, Cobb Schools spokesman. “Our principals are working using the Georgia Performance Standards and are making sure it aligns with what their school is doing. We are also working with individual at-risk kids to help them succeed.’’

But low rates were not limited to alternative schools.

In Gwinnett, for example, Meadowcreek High had a 64.5 percent rate and Central Gwinnett High was below the state average at 72.7 percent.

Like Georgia, nearly half of the 17 states probed in the national study showed some improvement in their overall graduation rates during the study period.

North Carolina gained some traction in improving its graduation rates, the report said, and became a leader in innovation with the New School Project, a public-private partnership that created up to 100 small schools designed to help students earn both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree, tuition free, in five years.

The other half of the states with lowest rates saw their rates level off or drop.

In most, the high schools with the lowest graduation rates served mostly poor and minority students. African-Americans and Hispanics in Georgia and elsewhere, according to the report, are more likely than white students to attend schools with low graduation rates.

In Georgia in 2009, the graduation rate for African-Americans was 72.6 percent and the rate for Hispanics was 69 percent.

Those rates showed improvement but still lagged behind whites, who had an 82.1 percent graduation rate, and the state average.

President Barack Obama has linked improving high school graduation rates to restoring the nation’s economic and political standing in the world.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is pumping billions of dollars into efforts intended to turn around low-performing schools and has laid groundwork for government agencies to work together.

But improving graduation rates, the report said, will require understanding the geographic spread and concentration of these schools and characteristics of the districts, schools and students.

To be successful, co-author Steinberg said, states and districts need access to the growing knowledge base of what works and where it works.

“It would be a waste of precious resources to quickly scale up interventions that were successful in one place without carefully analyzing the conditions that make success possible and understanding which innovations work under what circumstances,” she said.

In Georgia, improving graduation rates will require approaching the problem from many different fronts, DOE spokesman Tofig said.

“We have to improve the data we’re gathering and analyzing,” he said.

In addition, Tofig said, Georgia has implemented a new set of standards that emphasizes mastery of core concepts so students don’t fall behind year after year and is expanding the number of options opened to them — including charter schools, career academies, magnet programs and a virtual school.

“There’s a tremendous amount going on, all ultimately aimed at increasing the number of students that are getting a meaningful high school diploma,” he said.