About 1.2 million U.S. public school students who should be graduating this year won't -- that's according to Christopher Swanson of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.
Bite: "That's about one student lost from the high school pipeline every 13 seconds."
The figures are the latest from a four-year EPE study of graduation and other factors related to the transition from high school to college, and, ultimately, to employment. It was just published in the journal Education Week.
The group crunched numbers for the class of 2005 -- the most recent data available for all 50 states.
In those results, Ohio fared pretty well overall at about 76 percent. The national graduation average was 71 percent.
Still, the study showed 210 Ohio high school students who were freshmen in 2005 were lost each school day before graduation. Black and Hispanic male students were hardest hit. THEY ranked at 42 and 41 percent.
EPE research director Christopher Swanson says those daunting numbers for Ohio aren't new. The figures are born out of historic problems like poverty and racial housing desegregation in urban areas.
Swanson: Northeastern cities, midwestern cities tend to have lower graduation rates than we see in the south and western states, and also more dramatic disparity between the central city and suburban districts. Just like anything else that we look at in education, what we see today may be the result of a long and troubled history.
Researchers say the emergence of P-16 groups, organizations that standardize curriculum between preschool and age 16, can help change historic educational inequities.
EPE's Amy Hightower says each P-16';s effectiveness varies, but the groups have proven to play a vital role in many states.
(Hightower) "most of the people we interviewed suggested if P-councils didn't exist someone would have to create them because the agenda of college and workforce readiness simply cannot be achieved by one sector going it alone."
Ohio passed a law in 2005 to create the P-16 group called the Ohio Partnership for Continued Learning, which has promoted the expansion of Science, Technology, Engineer and Math coursework known as STEM. According to the study, the Ohio group is formulating its recommendations.
Kymberli Hagelberg, 90.3