Education Associations Seek To Improve Graduation Rates

Various colleges and universities teamed up to publish a report advocating for education reform.

Its not enough just to get students into college, students must graduate. A commission of the nation’s six leading higher-education associations is calling for extensive reform to better serve the new college population. In a college climate composed of older and part-time students, completion should be the main priority. Community colleges, research institutions, public universities and small liberal arts colleges—all teamed up to create the report, “College Completion Must Be Our Priority.”  The report, released Thursday, calls on education institutions to find ways to give students credit for previous learning through exams, portfolio assessments or other college equivalency evaluations. It also calls for more innovative services like midnight classes, easier credit transfers and more efficient course delivery.

Its still unclear whether the report will lead much change, but Molly C. Broad, president of the American Council on Education believes it could create a new sense of urgency. (NY Times)

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College Graduation Rates Need Raising, Group Says

Report call on colleges to give students more credit for previous learning

Wonder why it’s taking your younger brother so long to finish a four-year degree? A commission of the nation’s six leading higher-education associations says schools are not properly serving a changing college population. Students are now skewing older and more of them are part-time. So the commission, in a report titled “College Completion Must Be Our Priority,” released on Thursday, calls on colleges and universities to find ways to give students credit for previous work. That could be through exams like the College Board’s College-Level Examination Program, portfolio assessments or other equivalency evaluations, the commission suggests. They’ve even threw midnight classes and more online classes on the table. Right now, almost half of the students who begin college at a two- or four-year institution fail to earn a degree within six years. Yikes! (New York Times)

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U.S. High School Grad Rate Highest Since 1976 [Study]

Education Department head says blacks and Latinos still have a ways to go

America’s high school graduation rate is the highest since 1976, the U.S. Department of Education said in a study released Tuesday. But the glass is half empty; more than a fifth of student are failing to get their diploma in the standard four years. The national dropout rate fell about 3 percent from last year, with 3.1 million students nationwide earning their high school diplomas in 2010. Arizona, Mississippi and Washington, D.C. have the highest dropout rates in the nation. African American and Latino communities still face an “unsustainably high” dropout rate, official said. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the rise of students completing their education is a sign of greater competition for new jobs in the struggling economy. "There's no young person who aspires to be a high school dropout," Duncan said. "When someone drops out, it's a symptom of a problem. It's not the problem itself. Something has gone radically wrong." (Associated Press)

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Drake Gives Speech At His High School Graduation Ceremony

Rap-singer talks about his journey to receive diploma after teenage dropout

Canadian-born rap-singer Drake recently spoke at the his high school graduation ceremony. See th 25-year-old talk about his journey to a diploma in the video player above.

[ALSO READ: Drake Tweets About Getting Diploma]

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Loop 21's 2012 Education Special

Loop 21 looks at education issues affecting our community.

In mid-September, President Barack Obama told a crowd in Golden, Colo., that, were it not for education, he and his wife, as people of color, would never have made it to the White House.

“Education was a gateway of opportunity for me,” Obama said. “You know, a mixed kid from Hawaii born to a single mom is not likely to become president of the United States. But in America, it can happen because of education, because somebody gave me opportunity…A little black girl from South Side of Chicago whose mom’s a secretary and dad’s a blue-collar worker, you know, not likely to become first lady of the United States. But it happened because she got a great education, even though her folks didn’t have a lot of money.”

While education is essential to success, many African-American children still do not have equal access to education at any level of the system, from kindergarten to university. African Americans are more likely to attend high-poverty schools and less likely than any other group to attend college. According to the National Education Policy Center, black students are suspended three times as often as white students. About 85 percent of young black men enter high school unable to read at proficient levels, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and a new report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education says that only 52 percent of black ninth-grade boys finish high school in four years.

A study released last year by the U.S. Department of Education shows that even the teachers who work in predominantly African American and Latino schools are at a disadvantage, as they are paid approximately $2,500 less per year than the average teacher in other districts.

“America has been battling inequity in education for decades but these data show that we cannot let up,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “Children who need the most too often get the least. It's a civil rights issue, an economic security issue and a moral issue.”

This week, Loop 21 is running an education special, looking at issues that affect the African American community. We began Monday with “Educating Black Boys,” a look at why young African American males tend to fare so poorly at school, and what can be done to improve their academic performance. Tuesday, we focused on what happens when people opt to drop out of school, with intimate looks at the lives of three young people in different communities, and today, we look at for-profit schools and also ask the question: how much will that degree really cost? Take our interactive quiz to find out. We will also cover President Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s remarks at the Education Nation Summit in New York, and look at trigger laws—laws that essentially allow parents to take over under-performing schools. Those laws were the inspiration for the movie “Won’t Back Down,” starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, which opens this Friday.

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Black Male High School Graduation Rates Improved, Still Drag Behind Whites

Averaged three-percentage point increase slightly narrows racial disparity in public school education

An education report released Wednesday shows more than half of young black men who graduated from high school in 2010 earned their diploma in the standard four years and improved the graduation rate that has lagged behind their white and Latino counterparts. The Schott Foundation for Public Education, which has tracked African American males in public schools since 2004, said 52 percent who entered ninth grade in 2006 graduated in fours years, compared to 78 percent of white males and 58 percent of Latino males. In 2009, the black male graduation rate was 47 percent. “At this rate it would take nearly 50 years for black males to graduate at the same rate as white males," said John Jackson, president and CEO of the Schott Foundation. (Associated Press)

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