Schools receive good news on graduation rate

Despite being in a perpetual drop-out crisis, the Philadelphia School District got pretty good news from a national report released today.

Of the districts in the nation's 50 largest cities, Philadelphia's saw the most improvement in graduation rates from 1995 to 2005, according to "Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap."

Philadelphia's graduation rate soared to 62.1 percent, up from 38.9 percent, said the report, released by retired Gen. Colin Powell's America's Promise Alliance.

Among the 50 largest cities, just 53 percent of students graduated from high school on time, said the report, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Despite marked improvement, Philadelphia trailed the national graduation average of 70.6 percent, up from 65.8 percent 10 years earlier.

"It's great news . . . but it's still not a great graduation rate," Courtney Collins-Shapiro, the Philadelphia district's director of Multiple Pathways to Graduation, said of the report's findings.

"We have a long way to go before we have done everything we can possibly do to get every student ready to graduate," she added.

The district's own graduation figure of 53 percent was derived using different data, some of which the national report's authors did not have access to, said Sean McGrew, the district's director of School Innovation and Best Practices.

A series of initiatives have been aimed at improving the graduation rate in recent years, including opening eight schools for overaged students, nearly doubling the number of high schools from 2000 to 2005 and focusing attention on freshmen students in 9th grade academies, said Collins-Shapiro.

The latest moves, she said, include opening a re-engagement center last August to help dropouts re-enroll; implementing an early-warning system in the fall to identify and help struggling 6th, 8th and 9th graders; and opening eight more schools for overage students next year. *