With one in four U.S. public school students dropping out of high school before graduation, America continues to face a dropout epidemic. Dropping out makes it harder for these young people to succeed in life, our economy loses hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity and our communities suffer enormous social costs. The 2012 report update of Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic, released March 19 by the Alliance for Excellent Education, America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows that the nation continues to make progress, with more than half of states increasing graduation rates.

The report also reveals that the number of “dropout factory” high schools—those graduating 60 percent or fewer students on time—decreased by 457 between 2002 and 2010, with the rate of decline accelerating since 2008. The number of “dropout factories” totaled 1,550 in 2010, down from 1,634 in 2009 and a high of 2,007 in 2002. The number declined by 84 between 2009 and 2010. As a result, 790,000 fewer students attended dropout factories in 2010 than 2002.

New York Times
January 25, 2012
Written by Henry M. Levine and Cecilia E. Rouse

ONLY 21 states require students to attend high school until they graduate or turn 18. The proposal President Obama announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address — to make such attendance compulsory in every state — is a step in the right direction, but it would not go far enough to reduce a dropout rate that imposes a heavy cost on the entire economy, not just on those who fail to obtain a diploma.
In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.
Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.

Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.

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Originally Written in the Detroit Public TV American Graduate Blog

During the State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama made a bold call for new action against the drop out epidemic.
Obama called for the nation’s sates to enforce a new requirement which would keep students who have not already graduated from high school or turned 18 in school.
Currently, more than 7,000 students drop out of school every day in America. These numbers have implications to impact not only the lives of youths leaving school, but also the future of America’s economy.
It is proven those who graduate are more likely to earn higher earnings over the course of their lives, than those who do not. Individuals without diploma or a GED, struggle in a highly competitive job market. Lacking a high school diploma is a serious barrier to a career path.
“When students are not allowed to drop out, they do better.” Is Obama’s observation, and seems to hold true.

For a full run down of President Obama’s State of the Union