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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Graduation Rate Improves in N.M.
By Andrea Schoellkopf
Journal Staff Writer
New Mexico's graduation rate improved slightly in 2006, meaning it is now ranked 48th among the states and the District of Columbia rather than last year's ranking of 50th place.
The Education Week study says the state's graduation rate was 56 percent based on the number of entering ninth-graders in 2002. The rate was 54.1 percent the year before.
New Mexico Education Secretary Veronica Garcia said the state is slated to release later this month a graduation rate for 2009 that will be based on individual student progress.
The new method, which will be required of all states in 2010-2011, will show students who have transferred or graduated early. Those students may not be counted as graduating in the current system.
The Education Week report, to be released today, shows 30,026 students entered ninth grade, but only 16,816 students graduated four years later.
"All you need to do is go to a ninth-grade assembly and (then) a high school graduation," Garcia said. "And then you see the difference. We're losing a lot of kids."
On New Mexico's improved ranking, she said, "While it's good to make that kind of growth for 2006, I wish we were talking about current data."
The Education Week report by Editorial Projects in Education Research Center places the national graduation rate at 69.2 percent for the class of 2006, with a 2.8 percentage point gain over the 1996 class. However, there had been an almost 1.5 percentage point drop from 2005, the first significant decline in more than a decade.
In a ranking of the 50th largest school districts, Albuquerque had the 18th lowest graduation rate.
Officials noted that large, urban districts with high poverty and high minority populations tend to have the lowest graduation rates, with Detroit's 26.8 percent getting the lowest mark, followed by Philadelphia, Dallas and Houston. Districts with the highest rates are Cypress-Fairbanks, Texas, and Montgomery County, Md., at 80.7 percent.
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