Almost like some sick joke,

Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation- .pdf

Using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data and the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI) methodology, we calculated graduation rates for all school districts in the nation’s largest cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas. This analysis examines graduates from the 2003-04 school year. National and state results for the graduating class of 2004 were published in Diplomas Count 2007: Ready for What?, a special issue of Education Week (available online at link). District-level data on graduation rates as well as customized, downloadable reports for every school system in the country can be accessed using EdWeek Maps (link). This online data and mapping service also allows users to create and navigate local maps of graduation patterns anywhere in the country.

Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in the America’s largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss. Only about one-half (52 percent) of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma. That rate is well below the national graduation rate of 70 percent, and even falls short of the average for urban districts across the country (60 percent). Only six of these 50 principal districts reach or exceed the national average. In the most extreme cases (Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis), fewer than 35 percent of students graduate with a diploma.

Further analysis demonstrates that the extremely low graduation rates for these large school systems contribute disproportionately to the nation’s graduation crisis. The principal school districts of America’s 50 largest cities collectively educate 1.7 million public high school students – one out of every eight in the country. However, these 50 education agencies account for nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of the 1.2 million students nationwide who fail to graduate with a diploma each year.

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The days when a high school dropout could count as a graduate if he promised to return for his diploma sometime in the future may soon come to an end. So may the days when a student was considered a dropout only if she registered as one. These are two of the many ways in which some local and state agencies inflate graduation rates and deceive the public and federal authorities. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says it's time to "end this dispute about what the right number is" and require all states to count high school graduates the same way.

The secretary's pledge to tackle inflated graduation rates comes on the heels of a new report that suggests the dropout problem has become a crisis in the nation's largest urban school systems.

Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, presented his most grim assessment of the U.S. economy to the Joint Economic Committee on Wednesday morning...In the credit markets, Bernanke cited strains including corporate debt, municipal bonds, student loans and government-backed mortgages.

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The Salt Lake Tribune reported last week that Zions Bank was bailing out of the federal government's largest student loan program, joining 26 other lenders that have done the same since last fall. The number of financial institutions leaving the program is unprecedented, according to the report, representing as much as 30 percent of its total loan volume.

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