A new national study supported by former Secretary of State Colin Powell's America's Promise Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has determined that Albuquerque Public Schools students graduate at a higher rate than the national average, according to a report on KOB-TV.

The study, titled "Cities in Crisis," (pdf download) looked at graduation rates in school districts in the nation's 50 largest metropolitan areas and found that APS ranked No. 16 with a graduation rate of 60.8 percent for the 2003-04 school year, according to the report by Christopher B. Swanson, director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

The average graduation rate in the 50 metropolitan areas studied in 2003-04 was 51.8 percent, according to the report.

APS acting Superintendent Linda Sink told KOB-TV she thinks the study inflates what the study implies is a dropout rate of nearly 40 percent, because it doesn't show what happens to all the students who started out as 9th graders in the district.

"Did they go to a charter? Did they go to another high school in Texas? We don't follow (them)," Sink told Eyewitness News 4. "So it's not fair to say that all of these kids dropped out."

Sink said 18 percent of APS's students move and 10 percent require more than four years to graduate, KOB-TV said.

By incorporating these and other factors, Sink said, APS's dropout rate is closer to 18 percent, the station reported.

A little to the south, the El Paso Independent School District ranked just behind Albuquerque at No. 17 on the list, with 60.5 percent of its students finishing all four years of high school with a regular diploma, the El Paso Times reported.

The data used in the study was collected by the U.S. Department of Education, and the study focused on the largest school district within a metropolitan area -- with EPISD the largest district among nine in the entire metro area, the Times said.

When all nine El Paso area school districts were considered, the graduation rate jumped to 66.2 percent, the Times reported.

The study paints a grim picture of the nation's high schools, especially those schools in the largest metropolitan areas, where urban students may be half as likely to graduate as their suburban counterparts.

"Whereas the conventional wisdom had long placed the (overall) graduation rate around 85 percent, a growing consensus has emerged that only about seven in 10 students are actually successfully finishing high school," the report's author wrote.

"If three out of every 10 students in the nation failing to graduate is reason for concern, then the fact that just half of those educated in America's largest cities are finishing high school truly raises cause for alarm," Swanson wrote. 

Your Name:

Your Email Address:

Rate this article:
Poor Great

Comment:

BOLD

"QUOTE"

UNDERLINE