Question: What do Baltimore, Cleveland and Indianapolis have in common? Answer: Some of the Worst Graduation Rates in the Country

by Kristina Gupta, Policy Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

The EPE Research Center released a new report about the high school graduation crisis in our nation’s largest cities. The report examines graduation rates in the principal school system (largest and most central school district) in the largest 50 cities in the country. According to the report, only about half (52 percent) of students in these districts complete high school on time with a standard diploma. This is way below the national graduation rate and below the average graduation rate for all urban school districts in the country. The worst offenders were the principal school districts in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis – shockingly, fewer than 35 percent of students in these districts graduate.

The report also examined differences between urban and suburban school districts in the metropolitan areas of these 50 cities. About 58 percent of students in the urban districts in these metropolitan areas graduate, compared with 75 percent of students in the suburban districts in these metropolitan areas. Baltimore, Columbus, Cleveland, New York, Denver, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis have the largest urban-suburban graduation rate gap – for each of these cities, the suburban graduation rate was more than 30-points higher than the urban graduation rate.

In more positive dropout prevention news, the Department of Education announced that it will finally begin to require all states to report graduation rates and dropout rates the same way. Hopefully, this step will address some of the most egregious methods states have used to inflate graduation rates (for example, until this year, New Mexico reported its graduation rate as the percent of 12th graders who went on to graduate, conveniently ignoring all of the students who dropped out between the 9th and 11th grades).

But all of this news points to the continuing and critical need to take proactive steps to address the alarming dropout crisis. While reporting dropout rates uniformly is a necessary first step, we can’t stop there. Among other things, schools and policymakers ought to be looking at which interventions and supports will be most effective for different groups of students. The Center’s prior research has shown that gender makes a difference in the reasons students drop out and the impact of intervention strategies.

We need to do a better job for all our students, both boys and girls. When faced with the dismal statistics revealed in the EPE report, we can’t afford to wait.