COLUMBUS – As students in central Ohio and all over the nation spent part of Memorial Day weekend collecting their high school diplomas, a new report suggests progress in improving graduation rates in Ohio and nationwide has stalled, especially among poor and minority students.
The 2016 “Building a Grad Nation” report shows in 2014 says, while Ohio’s rate of 81.8 percent is high, it lags behind the national graduation rate, which hit a record high of 82.3 percent in 2014, and has remained stagnant for several years.
Lead author Jennifer DePaoli with the group Civic Enterprises says there are disparities among student subgroups.
“Ohio has the third-largest gap between black and white students, the seventh-largest gap between Latino and white students and Ohio has the eighth-largest gap between low-income and non-low-income students,” she said.
DePaoli says the findings suggest more work is needed to reach a national goal of a 90 percent nationwide graduation rate by the Class of 2020.
The report offers recommendations on how to get there, including ending “zero-tolerance” discipline policies, expanding early-warning indicators, and making school funding more equitable.
The report also shows more than half of low-graduation-rate high schools in the country are charter, virtual and alternative schools and DePaoli says Ohio has one of the highest rates of non-graduates in its charter and online schools.
“Even within Ohio there are charter schools that are doing very well,” she said. “But there’s a large number that are really struggling to graduate students on time.”