WASHINGTON— If America’s high school dropout problem is a patient in critical condition, his situation has improved in recent years but still not enough to move him out of intensive care.
That’s one of the messages conveyed by a new report released Tuesday by America’s Promise Alliance, the Washington-based national youth advocacy group founded by retired U.S. Army Gen. Colin Powell.
The report — titled Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic — found that the number of dropout factories — the phrase used to describe high schools where 40 percent or more of the students fail to graduate — has dropped from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008.
Powell said the report shows that “there’s still a long way to go.”
“We should not underestimate the difficulties that are ahead,” Powell said at the report’s official release, held at the Gallup World Headquarters in Washington.
Education officials, advocates and experts at the event sounded similar themes, pointing out that despite the progress made in curtailing the number of dropout factories in the nation, the dropout problem continues to persist most in high-poverty urban school districts.
“We still don’t have one high poverty urban school district with a graduation rate over 75 percent,” said report co-author Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re still not even at the C-plus level.”
