Georgia is dropping its dropout rate

By Dave Spence

Georgia continues to make some of the South’s largest gains on high school graduation rates — a sign that our state has become a leader in addressing the dropout crisis.

The state’s graduation rate is 79 percent for 2009, up significantly from 63 percent in 2002.

The growth in the number of Georgia graduates is exceeding enrollment growth at each grade in high school. In 2007, more than 19,000 more students graduated from high school than a decade earlier.

Federal data show a similar upward trend. Georgia’s on-time graduation rate rose by 3.3 percentage points from 2003 to 2007, to 64 percent. The graduation rates differ because they’re calculated differently.

Neither the federal nor state rates are perfect. But in 2011, all states will be required under No Child Left Behind to use a new, common rate that accounts for every student more accurately. This new rate will require a more advanced student-data system that few states have — and that Georgia is developing now.

No matter how you count Georgia’s graduation rates, they’re rising. Georgia is setting the pace for creating state policies that help improve graduation rates.

Gov. Sonny Perdue pushed for the state to become the nation’s first to provide graduation coaches for most public high schools and middle grades schools. And our state is the only one to set a 100 percent graduation rate goal for all public high schools by the year 2014.

The state has provided summer learning opportunities for students who didn’t pass high school exit exams. The state also continues to raise academic standards and has aligned curricula so that each grade prepares students for the next — and so that more graduates are truly ready for college and career training.

Under Superintendent Kathy Cox’s leadership, Georgia also has upped its high school diploma requirements to include four years each of science (including biology and either physics or physical science) and math.

The state also is improving career/technical education, aligning high school courses with industry needs across the state and analyzing more detailed data on where students land after high school.

About two-thirds of the state’s high school graduates now proceed to some type of postsecondary education. This was unimaginable just a few generations ago.

Anyone who doubts the progress Georgia is making to improve education and graduation rates isn’t looking hard enough. But our work is far from done, and our state’s leaders know it.

Georgia and many other Southern states remain lower than the national average.

It’s important for Georgians to understand how the dropout issue affects all communities in our state — urban, suburban, rural and across race and ethnic backgrounds.

Even so, widespread improvements abound.

From 2003 to 2009, state data show that all three major racial/ethnic groups have seen double-digit gains in their graduation rates. Plus, the gap between white and black students has narrowed by more than half, from 17.7 points to 8.6 points. The gap between white students and their Hispanic peers has narrowed nearly by half, from 21.5 points to 11.7 points in the same period.

Hispanic students, our fastest growing student population, have the lowest average graduation rate of the three major racial/ethnic groups at 71 percent, compared with 74 percent for black students and 83 percent for white. But Hispanic students have seen the largest average yearly gain of those groups — 3.7 percent — from 2003 to 2009.

The reason these gaps are narrowing may be Georgia’s overall progress in improving education. The state was strongest in the nation in narrowing its math achievement gap among eighth-graders from low-income families from 2003 to 2007, according to the Education Week Quality Counts report.

Our state also was ranked high nationally in narrowing the same gap among eighth-graders in reading, and in overall gains in fourth- and eighth-grade reading during the same period on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Still, the overall dropout problem and the major gaps that remain must continue to be addressed.

To do more to address the dropout problem, Gov. Perdue led a nonpartisan committee of leaders from across the 16 Southern Regional Education Board states that met over the last two years to develop more ways to improve high schools. The committee’s work led to a new landmark report, The Next Generation of School Accountability: Improving High School Graduation Rates and Achievement in SREB States, online at www.sreb.org.

Among the report’s many important recommendations for states:

● Give schools equal credit for improving both graduation rates and test scores. Georgia should hold schools more accountable for improving graduation rates each year. Texas, Florida and other states already are moving in this direction.

● Help students meet higher-than-minimum achievement levels. Most states only require students to pass minimum-level exams to graduate.

Why not reward schools instead for helping students move to a higher level that indicates they’re well-prepared for college or career training?

Commendably, Georgia is moving toward more rigorous, end-of-course high school exams while also keeping its graduation rate goals high.

The governor, key legislators and the state superintendent deserve credit for making the improvement of graduation rates a top priority in education.

The state needs to build on this progress and be a leader into the future in improving both high school achievement and graduation rates.

Dave Spence is the president of the Southern Regional Education Board, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization that works with 16 member states to improve pre-k/12 and higher education.