Graduation Rate in Detroit

Feb 25, 2008 - A study by the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University states that just 31.9 percent of Detroit students graduate in four years. And Education Week study found fewer than a quarter of ninth-graders who entered Detroit Public Schools in 1999 graduated four years later.

The MU study found an even lower graduation rate for boys enrolled in Detroit Public Schools: just 25 percent, compared with 39 percent of girls.

Statewide, the new study found the graduation rate in 2006 -- 72.9 percent -- was significantly lower than the state Department of Education's 85.7 percent graduation rate for the class of 2006, the last year for which data is available.

State Department of Education spokeswoman Jan Ellis said Michigan this year began assigning identity codes to students, which will eventually be used to track them as they move through the educational system and on into college. But coordinating such a system with colleges will take time, she said.
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TT - Meanwhile the newest 'give-us-more-money' edu-buzz is the "graduation rates" or "dropout rates" crisis, figures that no one can calculate with any certainty without identifying individual students and following them through the system.

When students who do leave graduate are burdened by inability to read or write adequately and lack basic skills needed to find and keep a job, and colleges have to offer remedial classes to roughly 28% of all incoming students, why worry about a "graduation rate" or a "drop-out" rate? How about just a "well educated rate?

(The percentage of those needing remedial classes is 52.9% in Arkansas.)