Fitzsimon File

The General Assembly session is now underway in earnest with committees dissecting Governor Mike Easley’s budget and debating a variety of issues, including a high risk insurance pool and toughening the state’s domestic violence laws.

Wednesday morning, House Speaker Joe Hackney released his version of the rules that will govern the operation of the House this session and it includes many of the changes proposed by the reform community to open up the legislative process. (more to come about Hackney’s plan on the NC Policy Watch blog, the Progressive Pulse. )

But maybe the most important news of the week for policymakers came from the State Board of Education meeting Wednesday afternoon. Education officials presented the state high school graduation rate using for the first time a simple formula to determine it, the percentage of students entering the 9^th grade who earn a high school diploma four years later.  

The data from the last four years show that 68.1 percent of high school students graduated. The report from the Department of Public Instruction breaks down the rate by race and gender. Just 60 percent of African-American students graduated in four years compared to 73.6 percent of white students.  

Females graduated at higher rates than males, but the report does not include a breakdown by gender within racial groups. National studies have found than less than half of the African-American males who enter the 9^th grade earn a diploma four years later.

Even without that startling figure, Wednesday’s numbers were disturbing enough. Only 2/3 of the state’s 9^th graders are graduating from high school. State Board members also heard about the well-documented consequences of dropping out, the tremendous cost to the state in lost tax revenue and the cost of providing social services.

More importantly, they heard about what it means for the students and their families, a much higher chance of living in poverty or ending up in prison, at the very least the certainty of earning far less than high school graduates, much less those who move on to some form of higher education.

Despite the scandalous numbers and sobering predictions of what they mean for students’ lives, there was a sense of urgency missing from the meeting. State Board members seemed concerned, but no one expressed outrage that a third of the kids in high school are not getting a diploma, severely damaging their chance to succeed in life.

Maybe it is the culture of the State Board. Maybe it’s because the Board members knew the figures were coming.  State officials have been criticized in the last few years for reporting much higher graduation rates based the percentage of students who graduated who did it in four years, leaving out the students who dropped out along the way.

The new numbers come as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind law and in the wake of criticism from national and state education advocacy groups urging the state to calculate the graduation rates this way all along, regardless of the federal requirements.

The Board did hear some straight talk about the graduation rate and ideas to address it from Vann Langston, who runs the High Five Regional Partnership for High School Excellence, a Triangle-based group of business and education leaders.

Department of Public Instruction officials urged people to consider the graduation rates “in context,” and talked about the similar struggles faced by other states and the fact that the figures don’t reflect students who might earn a diploma in summer school after their senior year.  

That’s all true and so is the fact that the state has some programs in place to try to reduce the number of dropouts, the New Schools initiative and Governor Mike Easley’s Learn and Earn program among them. And let’s hope they work.

But in what possible context are the graduation rates not a reason for alarm and outrage, and more importantly for a passionate commitment to do something about it? 

At least everyone now agrees on how bad the problem is. Now they need to make it a priority to do something about it before a third of another generation is lost. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.