The Surprising Reasons America’s High School Graduation Rates Have Skyrocketed

One of Barack Obama’s goals when he ran for president in 2008 was for more American students to graduate from high school. His campaign rhetoric seems to have had an impact.

New reports by the National Center for Education Statistics and America’s Promise Alliance show that the high school graduation rate is rising. Eighty-one percent of all high school students graduated in 2012, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s the highest graduation rate in U.S. history.

Iowa, Vermont, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Texas were the states with the highest percentages of graduates, with overall graduation rates at 88 or 89 percent. The lowest-ranking states were Alaska, Georgia, New Mexico, and Nevada, with rates lower than 70 percent.

According to the nationwide study, girls had a higher graduation rate, at 84 percent, with boys at 77 percent.

By 2020, graduation rates for all American high school students will rise to 90 percent, according to America’s Promise Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“The increase in graduation rates is certainly good news, and it offers a much-needed counter-narrative to the prevailing story line that American schools are in a state of crisis, a story based in large part on the country’s lower rankings on international tests like PISA,” says Jerusha Conner, a professor at Villanova University who studies national education issues.

According to the America’s Promise Alliance report, one contributing factor to the higher numbers is the shutting down of some failing schools. The report notes that 648 “dropout factory” high schools were closed between 2001 and 2012.

Also according to that report, education reform initiated by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top is paying off. In 2008, the U.S. Department of Education held all of the nation’s high schools accountable for their graduation rates and required them to report disaggregated outcomes for key student subgroups such as minorities—a product of No Child Left Behind. The Obama administration has pushed aggressively to reduce the number of high schools that produce dropouts.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, “Roughly 1,600 schools (about 10 percent of all high schools) produce nearly half of our nation’s dropouts and up to two-thirds of minority dropouts. These dropout factories are unacceptable and devastate the communities in which they exist.”

“Students who graduated in 2012 were freshmen in 2008, when reform efforts of the nation’s low-performing schools were well underway and during the very time when graduating from high school became more rigorous, showing that many schools and districts are rising to a standard of excellence,” says the America’s Promise Alliance report.

In racial breakdowns, 86 percent of white students and 88 percent of Asian students earned high school diplomas, according to the National Center for Education Statistics report. From 2006 to 2012, the graduation rate for white students rose from 84 percent to 86 percent and for Asians from 87 percent to 88 percent. During that time, there was a 15 percent increase (from 61 percent to 76 percent) for Hispanic students and a 9 percent increase (from 59 percent to 68 percent) for black students graduating in the United States.