The report, Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools looks at the low-performing high schools where the majority of U.S. high school dropouts come from. There are seventeen states that have the lowest graduation rates in the United States. 70% of the nation’s dropouts can be found in these seventeen states.  70% of the schools with the lowest graduation rates are also found in these seventeen states.

The report isolated three factors in making strategic choices about improving high schools with the lowest graduation rates:

·         Factor 1 – Patterns of Geographic Spread and Concentration: Implications for Local, State, and Federal Action.

·         Factor 2 – District, School, and Student Characteristics: Analysis of Opportunities and Challenges

·         Factor 3 – State and Community Context: Broader Factors Influencing Local Opportunities

Factor 1 – Patterns of Geographic Spread and Concentration.

For low performing high schools, the authors divided the seventeen states into three distinct patterns: (A) Big City Challenge (B) Statewide Spread and (C) Statewide Crisis.

Big City Challenge: Four states have one big city that is the most challenging: Illinois (Chicago), New York (New York City), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), and Tennessee (Memphis).  Each of these cities have low graduation-rate high schools in their districts.

Statewide Spread: There are eight states: California, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan with a moderate number of low-performing high schools that are spread throughout the state.

Statewide Crisis: There are five states: Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia with a high concentration of districts throughout the state with low performing high schools.

Factor 2 – District, School, and Student Characteristics

It is necessary to look carefully at the districts, the schools, as well as the students in the high schools with a high dropout rate. The question here is, how many of the high schools with a high dropout rate are the only high school in the district, as those students would have no options for other high schools?

Other questions would consider:

·         School size – Is it a large school where it is easy for students to get lost?

·         Student-teacher ratio – How many teachers are there for how many students? How many teachers are credentialed?

·         Proportion of students living in poverty – What is the status of the local neighborhoods?

·         Proportion of students that are from minority backgrounds  

Factor 3 – State and Community Context: Broader Factors Influencing Local Opportunities

All seventeen states have been hard hit by the current economic conditions. Eleven of the states are amongst the fifteen in the country with the highest unemployment rate.  The broader picture considers these factors:

·         Socioeconomic

·         Demographic

·         Political trends

·         Vibrancy of local economy

The report makes four recommendations for immediate federal action.

·         Require states seeking ARRA funds to use analytic data on graduation rates and include that data when they describe how they will turn around low performing high schools.

·         Build capacity of states, districts, and schools to implement appropriate high school reform strategies. Those working with low performing high schools need to recognize when the state, or the districts, or the individual schools themselves are best fit to handle their problem.

·         Designate additional federal innovation funding for the development and replication of effective school designs for transforming or replacing low graduation-rate high schools. Design schools that work in the communities with failing schools. Examine and scale up successful programs when possible.

·         Target federal financing to high schools, districts, and states with the most pressing dropout problems. As with the financial institution, AIG, these high schools and states are too big to fail. Graduation Bonds similar to Recovery Bonds within ARRA could be used to bring fresh opportunity to these hard pressed schools.

The report, Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools concludes with this statement:  

 “In order to make progress, our nation’s leaders and the public must get beyond the myth that ‘nothing works,’ that low graduation-rate schools cannot be transformed or replaced successfully. The growing knowledge base of promising strategies, combined with a more concerted effort to match reforms to the circumstances where they are most likely to succeed, can go a long way in helping the nation reach the president’s goal of once again being the first in the world in the percentage of our young people who complete high school and earn a postsecondary credential as well.”

Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools  by Robert Balfanz, Cheryl Almeida, Adria Steinberg, Janet Santos, and Joanna Hornig Fox, July 2009. Everyone Graduates Center, Jobs for the Future