I was reading a news article about high school graduation rates. The study the article was quoting said that Georgia has a graduation rate of only 56%. The nationwide average is supposedly 70%. I'm shocked. Those numbers sound awfully low. Can it be true that little more than half of Georgia teens get a high school diploma? I wonder if they are adequately accounting for students who move out of the district or state, but continue on in school.
If I had to guess about graduation rates, I would have put the number between 80-90%. Maybe I've lived a sheltered life. I grew up in a suburban Atlanta county, not a particularly well-to-do one, and don't remember many kids dropping out of school. A couple of girls got pregnant and there were a few druggies that left or got kicked out, but most of us got through it. I find these numbers disheartening. All those kids throwing away their futures. Why?
5 comments:
I think that when you're a kid and you're in trouble you don't realize that you're putting your future in jeopardy. Trust me on this one.
Yep, it's true. Tennessee came in at 62%, a subject of much hand-wringing in the local media lately.
If you saw the breakdown for metropolitan areas, Atlanta doesn't do that bad. You guys rank 14th out of the 50 largest school districts in the country. The Nashville-Davidson County School District ranks 36th, barely graduating 50% of its high school students. (In last place, Detroit has a less than 22% graduation rate!)
One thing to remember is that these figures count only public school students. The figures would improve if private school students were included, especially in the South where private schools grew like Topsy in response to court-ordered integration. For example, the population of Nashville is 25% black, but 60% of Nashville public school students are black. Upper middle-class parents throughout the country (not just the South) paying tuition to private schools have been increasingly reluctant to pay adequate taxes to support public schools their kids don't attend, and that's a big part of the problem.
It is disconcerting. The crappy part about NY ratings is that the lump the city with upstate. They're like two different worlds. I'd like to see different stats for both.
I was wondering how rural areas differ from inner city and suburbs. But the county I live in has a rate of 51%, which is worse than the state average, and most of the metro counties. Not counting private school students no doubt hurts the statistics. Many well-off kids in my county go to private school - even the ones who live in the best public school districts.
Egads, Detroit at 22%...that's horrible. I knew there were dropouts, but that number is depressing. I'm realising, of course, that number relates to the City and not the metropolitan area, but dear heavens.
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