Researchers studying the nation’s high school dropout rates fight about the gaps in graduation rates between African-American and Latino students and white students, but ignore the huge gaps in achievement among graduates.
Nationally, African-American and Latino 17 year-olds in school perform at the same level as 13 year-old white high school students on the 2004 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests. So a high school diploma means a lot less for many these students than for white students because they are under-prepared for college:
Only 40.8 percent of African-American and 37.3 percent of Hispanic high school graduates enroll in college, whereas 47.4 percent of whites enroll.
Fewer than half of the African-American and Hispanic students enroll in college will actually graduate.
The crisis in today’s high schools are as much about poor preparation of high school graduates, especially of minority students, as dropout rates. Researchers and the media need to start looking at both issues more intensively.
(Sherman Dorn, EduWonk, and Let’s Get It Right have more.)
Previous in TP Politics
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.