One of the most fundamental tasks of public education is to ensure that students graduate with a diploma that prepares them for future education, work, and citizenship. But for the school year now ending, an estimated 1.23 million U.S. students, most of them members of minority groups, will fail to graduate with their peers. That’s about 30 percent of the class of 2007.
For this year’s Diplomas Count, an annual report produced with support from the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center and Education Week explore what it means to ensure that high school students graduate prepared for both higher education and the workplace.
This report also provides detailed data on graduation rates across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and in the nation’s 50 largest school districts. The analysis is based on the Cumulative Promotion Index developed by Christopher B. Swanson, the director of the EPE Research Center and a prominent expert on graduation data.
—The Editors
