6-21-06 Star Ledger - Washington DC Bureau re graduation rates & quality education
Star Ledger
Graduation rates in New Jersey secondary to none
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
BY J. SCOTT ORR
STAR-LEDGER WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- Approximately 85 percent of students who begin high school in New Jersey end up with diplomas four years later, a figure that places the state atop the nation, according to a pair of reports issued yesterday.
The reports -- from the nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education, publisher of Education Week, and the National Center for Education Statistics in the Department of Education -- showed New Jersey's graduation rate well above the national average of approximately 70 percent.
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Jay Doolan, acting assistant New Jersey education commissioner, said a series of initiatives aimed at pushing students to meet statewide standards have come together to boost student performance.
"We've worked very hard, the districts have worked very hard and the teachers have worked very hard to make sure all of our children are prepared well for careers and post-secondary education," he said.
In 1996, he said, the state adopted standards for students in kindergarten through high school that spelled out what they should know and what they should be able to do at each level.
Lynne Strickland of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, which represents 110 mostly suburban public school districts, added that it is not just the education infrastructure that accounts for the state's showing.
"In general, New Jersey has a highly educated population; we have high income levels and many, many schools have a high degree of parental involvement," she said.
New Jersey's numbers also may have benefited from the fact that it offers a less rigorous exit exam, called a Special Review Assessment, to those who fail at least one section of the standard high school graduation test. The state is currently phasing out that option.
The National Center for Education Statistics figures showed New Jersey leading the nation with an 87 percent graduation rate for the year that ended Sept. 30, 2003. It dropped to second with 86.3 percent, behind Nevada's 87.6 percent, for the year that ended Sept. 30, 2004.
In the study for Education Week, which used a slightly different formula, New Jersey ranked first for the 2002-2003 school year with a graduation rate of 84.5 percent. That study, which also looked at demographic information, found New Jersey students graduated at rates above the national average in all gender and race categories.
New Jersey males graduated at a rate of 81.3 percent compared with an average 65.2 percent nationally; the rate for females in the state was 85.2 percent compared with 72.7 percent nationally.
Likewise, the graduation rate was 88.7 for Asian Americans, compared with 77 percent nationally; 69 percent for Hispanics, compared with 55.6 percent nationally; 66.1 percent for blacks, compared with 51.6 percent nationally and 86.9 percent for whites, compared with 76.2 percent nationally.
The worst showings among the states were still far better than those of some of the nation's largest school districts examined in the report. In Detroit, the nation's 11th-largest district, the graduation rate was 21.7 percent.
Other poor performing districts: Baltimore, the 30th-largest district, 38.5 percent; New York, the biggest district, 38.9 percent; and Los Angeles, the second-largest; 44.2 percent.
The Education Week report is the first of four annual reports planned under a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, so it offers no prior year figures for comparison.
A similar report from the Educational Testing Service looked at data from 2000 and found that New Jersey's graduation rate that year was 83 percent, the sixth-highest in the country.
That 2000 study found the nation's graduation rate at 70 percent in 2000, down from its peak of 77 percent in 1969.
