WASHINGTON – U.S. children are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents, and most states are doing little to hold schools accountable, according to a child advocacy group’s study.
More than half of states have graduation targets that don’t make schools get better, says a report released Thursday. The numbers are dismal: One in four kids is dropping out of school, a rate that hasn’t budged in five years.
“The U.S. is stagnating while other industrialized countries are surpassing us,” said Anna Habash, author of the report by Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of minority and poor children. “And that is going to have a dramatic impact on our ability to compete.”
In fact, the United States is now the only industrialized country where young people are less likely than their parents to earn a diploma, the report said, citing data compiled by the international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
High schools are required to meet graduation targets every year as part of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.
But those targets are set by states, not by the federal government. And most states allow schools to graduate low percentages of students by saying that any progress, or even the status quo in some cases, is acceptable.
According the Education Trust’s Web site, Washington state’s goal in 2007 was 69 percent and that its improvement target was to increase graduate rates by two percentage points every year. The state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction reports that on-time graduation in the state is 72.4 percent and that the extended rate is 77.4 percent.
Others weren’t so ambitious:
• In Maryland, schools must improve their graduation rate by 0.01 percentage point each year. At that rate, it would take most of a millennium for the graduation rate among black students, now 71 percent, to reach the state goal of 90 percent.
• In Delaware and New Mexico, schools will never have to meet a state goal as long as they maintain the same graduation rate.
Why are states setting the bar so low? Because they can, said Bob Balfanz, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
“A lot of states said, ‘Well, we’re under a lot of pressure; let’s not make this too hard on ourselves,’” Balfanz said. “They were given a loophole, and they took it.”
The News Tribune contributed to this report.
