24/7 Wall St.

The U.S. high school graduation rate rose to 83.2% in the 2014-2015 school year, a 4 percentage point increase from 2010-2011 when the states began using a consistent gauge of high school completion. 24/7 Wall St. recently reviewed the 25 U.S. metro areas with the highest graduation rates and the 25 with the lowest. Metro areas in Texas and Alabama are well-represented in the top 25, while municipalities in Florida, Oregon, and New Mexico occupy many of the lower spots.

To determine the graduation rates of U.S. metro areas, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

Click here to see the 25 metro areas with the highest graduation rates.
Click here to see the 25 metro areas with the lowest graduation rates.

Here’s a closer look at what these areas have in common and the factors that might particularly contribute to a region’s ranking.

Five of the 25 metro areas with the highest graduation rates are in Texas: Wichita Falls, Sherman-Denison, Longview, Tyler, and Amarillo.

The Lone Star State in recent years has touted its elevated high school graduation rates, particularly among minority students.

“We really want to believe in Texas’ numbers because they’ve been consistent,’’ said Jennifer DePaoli, senior researcher and policy adviser at Civic Enterprises, a social enterprise organization that seeks initiatives for education, health, and other issues, who cited Iowa as an example. “But there are data concerns as to what they are counting as a graduate vs. a completer, which they are not supposed to count. It doesn’t mean these districts that are listed aren’t doing a phenomenal job. But with the overall rate, we tend to look at the rate hesitantly.’’

While completers do complete the requirements for a general education diploma (GED), they do not necessarily do so within the specified four years.

Alabama has four areas in the top 25: Dothan, Florence-Muscle Shoals, Anniston-Oxford-Jacksonville, and Huntsville.

Alabama ranked third in the nation in graduation performance, and that got the attention of the U.S. Department of Education last November, which confirmed that it was auditing the Alabama Department of Education. One of the red flags was that the student achievement and ACT (American College Testing) scores across Alabama were among the lowest in the country. Alabama’s state superintendent of education, Michael Sentance, said in December that the state had counted special-needs students who had earned a diploma, which it should not have done. And the state had also failed to cite districts for graduating students who hadn’t completed the requisite coursework.

The Florida areas with the lowest graduation rates on the list are Sebring, Lakeland-Winter Haven, Panama City, and Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach. The four Oregon areas are Grants Pass, Albany, Eugene, and Salem. New Mexico is represented by Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Farmington.

Florida and New Mexico are states that historically have had low graduation rates, according to DePaoli. Oregon and New Mexico are two states that in recent years have traded places as the state with the lowest graduation rates among all the states.

“Oregon has a lot of rural districts that don’t have a lot of resources. What we tend to see is in districts where poverty levels are very high, graduation rates are very low. Also, the state also has a pretty high Native American population. Those students, unfortunately, also tend to graduate at much lower rates.’’ The Oregon Department of Education acknowledged on its website the challenges of trying to narrow the learning gap between native students and their peers. “Whether native students are dropping out, or stepping out, the result is the same — low employment rates, depressed economic development, separatism, and poverty.’’

There are a host of factors that contribute to high school graduation outcomes, including teen birth rates, the percentage of children living in single-parent households, unemployment rates, and areas where many people do not speak English as a first language.

In 22 of the 25 metro areas with the highest graduation rate on the 24/7 Wall St. list, the teen birth rate is lower than the rate nationwide. The highest teen birth rate on the list is in Odessa, Texas, which also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country, at 71.1%. In 21 of the 25 metro areas with the lowest graduation rates, a higher share of children live in single-parent households than the nation overall. In all 25 areas with the lowest graduation rates, the unemployment rate is higher than the national jobless rate.

Where English is not the first language spoken at home — such as areas in New Mexico and Florida — that is also a contributing factor to lower graduation rates. “We tend to see high graduation rates in states that are not diverse,’’ said DePaoli.

After U.S. high school graduation rate increases plateaued in the late 1990s, the nation became concerned. The federal government got involved in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act that required states to make measurable progress on high school graduation rates or face sanctions such as a loss of funds for poor students. The unintended consequences of possible punitive measures by the federal government may have forced some districts to lower standards for graduation to meet mandated goals.
A big issue regarding data is how school districts and states report graduation rates. Some include completers as high school graduates. Including completers inflates graduation rates and complicates comparisons.

“In some districts, things are being done to get graduation rates up in a non-meaningful way,” said DePaoli. “Many large districts have become too dependent on programs like credit recovery,” she said. This program allows students enrolled in traditional schools to take recovery credit courses online to meet high school graduation requirements.

DePaoli hopes that will change following the enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in December 2015, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act. The new act will not penalize states if they fall below the 67% graduation rate, but support them, DePaoli explained. This hopefully will motivate districts to report more accurate graduation rates.

DePaoli also said other factors that have helped improve graduation rates are changes in juvenile justice that have made the system less punitive, as well as reduction in expulsion and suspension policies that try to keep students in school.

Click here to see the 25 metro areas with the highest graduation rates.
Click here to see the 25 metro areas with the lowest graduation rates.