Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools

This report from Jobs for the Future examines three major factors that should be considered when making choices about improvement strategies: patterns of geographic spread and concentration; state, district, and school characteristics; and socioeconomic, demographic, and political trends in the community.

The report’s authors make the following recommendations to the federal government:

• Require states seeking ARRA “Race to the Top” funding to use analytic data on graduation rates and low graduation-rate high schools as part of their plans for turning around failing schools.
• Build the capacity of states, districts, and schools to implement appropriate high school reform strategies.
• Designate additional federal innovation funding for development and replication of effective school designs to use in transforming or replacing low graduation-rate high schools.
• Target federal financing to high schools, districts, and states with the most pressing dropout problems.