High School Completion

The beginning of the school year offers new opportunities for students and communities across the country. For young people, completing high school is an important step in preparing for adulthood. However, according to America’s Promise, one in four public school children drop out before they finish high school; amounting to 1.3 million students a year – one every 26 seconds, 7,000 every school day. The rate of high school drop-out is a crisis impacting the young people, families and communities that make up this country; and the economic impact for the U.S. is significant (costing society billions of dollars and endangering the country’s ability to compete in the 21^st century workforce). Grad Nation, an initiative of America’s Promise, has two goals related to improving rates of high school completion: achieving a 90 percent graduation rate nationwide by 2020, with no school graduating less than 80 percent of its students, and to regain America’s standing as first in the world in college completion. Through this initiative, America’s Promise released, Building a Grad Nation, a report that highlights successes in raising the graduation rates in rural, suburban and urban school districts across the country.

There are a number of resources available for policymakers considering ways to ensure students are supported and successful in school.

• A report from the Alliance for Excellent Education, Ten Elements of a Successful High School, offers a check-list to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of community schools and provides a guide for determining the actions needed to help improve them.
  
• To get a sense of the severity of high school drop-out rates in your community, Education Week’s Research Center offers a Graduation Rate Map. This interactive tool allows users to review data for the last ten years including the demographic profiles of school districts and graduation rates, and allows for comparison with the national average.
• The Harvard Family Research Project report, Partnerships for Learning: Promising Practices in Integrating School and Out-of-School Time Program Supports, is a great resource for guidance on implementing partnerships aimed at improving learning through the connection of in-school and out-of-school time.
• The National Governors’ Association issue brief, State Policies to Reengage Dropouts, provides state-level strategies and state examples for reengaging young people who drop-out of school as well as information on the degree of cost associated with the proposed strategy.
• For results-based public policy strategies for increasing high school graduation rates, including ways to support student success from pre-school to adulthood and strategies for targeting high need students and schools, visit PolicyforResults.org.