Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Raising High School Graduation Rates. Annual Update 2018

The report takes an in-depth look at the progress that was made between 2011 and 2016 in raising high school graduation rates and the state and district sources of those improvements, and identify where challenges remain. It also links improvements in high school graduation rates to the need to ensure that all students, including those historically underserved by the education system, graduate high school prepared for postsecondary education. This year's report comes at a turning point for the nation, as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) becomes a reality and the power of accountability moves from the federal government into the hands of states. It also comes amid growing calls to revamp high school education to better equip students with the academic, social, and emotional skills they need to succeed in postsecondary education and careers, and within a larger conversation on long-standing inequities for young people of color, those growing up in poverty, and children with disabilities. It provides a baseline by which state efforts under ESSA can be examined and shows for each state, which districts have been driving progress, which subgroups of students are over-represented in each state's four-year non-graduates, and in which types of schools--traditional, alternative, or virtual--students who do not graduate on time can be found. At the same time, there remain concerns about gains in some places, with reports of individual schools ushering students through who are not ready to graduate, credit recovery programs and alternative schools that lack quality and rigor, and a number of issues of variability in calculating graduation rates that need to be addressed to continue to give us comparable measures of progress and challenge across schools, districts, and states. It concludes with a set of policy and practice recommendations that aim to help the nation reach its goal of a 90 percent high school graduation rate for all students, and provide full state-by-state data in the appendices. [For the 2017 report, see ED585520.]