State’s grad rate bests nation’s

Herald Staff and News Services

The high school graduation rate for young Americans rose slightly to a record 86.5 percent last year, the Education Department recently reported.

Hispanic, black and low-income students lagged behind whites and the well-to-do.

Washington state did a little better than the national average at 87.4 percent.

Locally, in a random sampling, results were mixed.

U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said rates had not risen in proportion to the billions of dollars spent on schools since the 1970s.

"The study (released today) is another indicator that we have not made enough progress in recent years to improve access to quality education and that comprehensive change is needed," Paige said.

Locally, Snohomish High School’s graduation rate in 2000 was at 96.5 percent, said J. Marie Merrifield, district spokeswoman.

She said school officials could not access the 2001 data, but they believe it didn’t change much.

However, that number could be misleading.

Merrifield said various schools calculate the graduation and dropout rates differently, some using the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the senior year, as they do. Others count from the number of students enrolled in the class as it enters the ninth grade.

Despite that, there is a reason the rate is so high in Snohomish.

"One of the reasons why we have such a low dropout rate is that we have a lot of different programs to give students another chance to come back," she said.

"One of them is our AIM alternative high school where often the principal will call students who drop out and get them to come back."

Mukilteo School District spokesman Andy Muntz said graduation rates have risen in the past five years there. Graduation rates for 2001 haven’t been compiled yet, he said, but the rate for 2000 was 84 percent.

In Everett, the rates varied from 81.4 percent at Jackson High School, to 89.5 percent at Everett High School and 86.4 percent at Cascade High School, all for the year 2000.

At Marysville-Pilchuck High School, the graduation rate was 78.9 percent last spring. The graduation rate has improved steadily in recent years. It was 75.6 percent in 2000 and 72.9 percent in 1999, according to district records.

After sliding a bit in the mid-1990s, the overall national percentage of students who finished high school or earned equivalency diplomas has inched up in the past three years, from 84.8 percent in 1998 to 85.9 percent in 1999 and 86.5 percent in 2000. The highest previous rate was 86.4 percent in 1992.

In 1972, the earliest year studied, the rate was 82.8 percent.

Nationwide, minority students’ completion rates have risen, too, but have lagged behind that of white students, whose 2000 rate was 91.8 percent. The rate for black students was 83.7 percent; for Hispanic students the rate was 64.1 percent.

The statistic measures the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who have graduated from high school or earned a GED. Compiled as part of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey each October, it is considered one important measure of national dropout figures.

Using another measure, researchers said about five of every 100 students ages 15 to 24 dropped out of school between October 1999 and October 2000, a figure that has remained fairly steady since 1987.

The dropout rate for the poorest 20 percent of students was six times that of the wealthiest 20 percent. About 10 percent of the poorest students dropped out of school between 1999 and 2000; in the same period, only 1.6 percent of the wealthiest students dropped out.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., who has pushed for dropout prevention legislation for several years, said the dropout rate remains high largely because keeping students in school isn’t a priority for many districts.

"We have too many large schools, particularly large high schools, but also large middle schools, where kids are lost track of, essentially," he said. "And we need to put a real focus on it."

The Senate last spring passed an education bill that includes Bingaman’s proposal to create an office of dropout prevention at the Education Department. It would give money to school districts that use proven strategies to keep students in school.

The House-passed bill has no such proposal. A House-Senate conference committee is reconciling the differences in the two bills and hopes to produce a compromise this year.

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