The College Fix

The NEA is waving this study around:

For the first time in U.S. history, the nation’s high school graduation rate rose above 80 percent in 2012, and the 90 percent milestone may be just around the corner, according to the 2014 Building a GradNation report released on Monday by Civic Enterprises, the Everyone Graduates Center, America’s Promise Alliance and the Alliance for Excellent Education.

“Our progress is amazing. Close to 400,000 more students per high school class are graduating now than in 2001 and more than 1 million fewer students attend dropout factories,” said Robert Balfanz, co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education…

Graduating from High School is great. But whether or not all of these graduates actually represent a better-educated population–we’ll leave for you to decide. But consider this little gem of info from Inside Higher Ed:

Not only does [analysis] find that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, but it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates — and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies — scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint…

Somehow, we don’t think the National Education Association will be trumpeting those kind of numbers any time soon. After all, if a significant number of college students can’t read, then that means lots of high school graduates can’t either.

And that raises the question of why these students were able/allowed to graduate from High School in the first place.

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