According to a new study by Education Trust, a group that advocates on behalf of minority and poor children, one in four high school students are not graduating with a diploma, making the United States the only industrialized country in the world where young people are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were.

“We’ve been seeing for a long time that the U.S. was a leader in achievement and attainment. Now, the rest of the world has caught up to us and is passing us by while we’ve stagnated,” said Anna Habash, a spokeswoman with the group Education Trust.
KCBS’ Melissa Culross reports

Habash, author of the Education Trust study, found that states are not doing enough to hold schools accountable for poor graduation rates.

Highs schools are required to meet graduation targets as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, but individual states set those targets and in many cases allow schools to graduate low percentages of students as long as there is some improvement, even a very small amount.

Habash says the low expectation states hold needs to change.

“States need to ramp up their expectations and say, ‘It’s not OK if you only improve one percentage point each year.’”

The federal government is expected to issue new rules next week that will require states to use a common system for tracking dropout rates.

(cfu)