Public schools got good news this week when the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the nation’s four-year high school graduation rate has surged to 78 percent, the highest it has been since 1974. The federal report also showed increases in the numbers of students for every racial category, particularly Hispanic students.
Allison Gulamhussein, intern at the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, has analyzed the report and notes that, “while we as a nation should certainly take pride in the fact that the year 2010 ushered in a greater percentage of graduates, such celebration shouldn’t eclipse the reality that increasing the number of diplomas without knowing the level of rigor those diplomas represent could be a fool’s errand.”
Read more of the analysis in CPE’s Edifier blog.
Exactly!
Let’s stop fooling ourselves with “data” that is mostly meaningless.
Until there is a national standard for “graduation” these kinds of comparisons are feel good items at best.
How many of these “graduates” are either ready for college work or have some vocational, and employable, skills?
I agree with Charles. I mean, yes, quantity is nice, but what we should really focus nowadays at, is quality. We produce many graduates, but do we really produce many quality workers? From my experience, only few of them. And even those do not have those qualities thanks to schools most of the time.
I am not saying that growth is bad, no, just that it’s not alpha and omega.