Recent reports that only two-thirds of all students and half of minorities end up with a high school diploma are overstated and rely on seriously flawed data, says a new Economic Policy Institute report. Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends, released April 20, argues that a wealth of better data shows high school completion rates are much higher, with about 75 percent of black and Hispanic students receiving diplomas nationally.

Although substantial gaps remain between the graduation rates of whites and either blacks or Hispanics, the report documents that graduation rates have been growing  and racial/ethnic gaps closing over the past four decades.

Claims that black and Hispanic students have only a 50-50 chance of completing high school rely on data collected by the U.S. Department of Education from state databases, says the report's authors, EPI president Lawrence Mishel and economist Joydeep Roy. These data have been too unquestioningly accepted even though the results they yield differ substantially from findings based on a wealth of other government data on high school completion, including the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), considered the best available on this issue.

EPI's report comes on the heels of a new Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study by Institute senior fellow and school voucher proponent Jay Greene, who claims that the nation's overall high school graduation rate is 70 percent, with 55 percent for African-American students, and 53 percent for Hispanic students.

But the EPI report says that the gold standard NELS data, which track individual students over time and verify diplomas against actual transcripts, show overall national graduation rates of 82 percent, and rates for black and Hispanic students of about 75 percent.

Mishel and Roy show that other national surveys that either track individual students or survey households, such as the decennial Census, and the Current Population Survey, used to track unemployment, confirm these higher graduation rates. The decennial Census data for 2000, when corrected for various measurement problems, show that whites graduate with a regular diploma at a rate about 15 percentage points higher than blacks and about 13 points higher than Hispanics. However, the black-white graduation gap has shrunk greatly since the 1960s and the Hispanic-white gap has shrunk over the last 10 years (the only period for which the necessary data are available).

"The very low graduation rates that are being cited are out of sync with what the most reliable data sources tell us," said Mishel. "We hope this report will clear the fog, create a better understanding of the true challenges we face and the progress we've made, and help lead the way to better targeted solutions for continuing to close the remaining gaps. Understanding where we are and how far we've come can help identify what has been working in American public education."

April 20, 2006