Over 120,000 Texas Students Failed to Graduate in 2006;

The graduation crisis in Texas

has reached a boiling point

with about one-third of the state’s public high school students “more than 120,000 young people failing to graduate with a regular diploma in 2006,” according to a new analysis conducted by the Bethesda, Md.-based Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center.

Seventy percent of all dropouts are minority students, including Black students, who have a statewide graduation rate of just 59.9, and Hispanics, whose rate is 57.8. The figures, calculated by the EPE Research Center using the widely reported Cumulative Promotion Index method, stand in stark contrast to official graduation rates from the Texas Education Agency of 81.1 percent for Blacks and 77.3 percent for Hispanics.

And the problem is worst in large cities where more than half of all students fail graduate according to the report, which cites district-level graduation rates of 46.3 for Dallas, and 48.9 for both Fort Worth and Houston, all of which fall far short of the official TEA figures of 81.3, 76.5 and 71.3, respectively. The EPE Research Center report includes overall and disaggregated graduation data for the 10 largest Texas school districts. A separate online mapping tool from EPE also provides comparable data for every district in the nation.

In some of the largest Texas districts, nearly 60 percent of some minority groups are failing to graduate, including Austin, which has a Hispanic graduation rate of 42.8 percent, Houston (43.3 percent) and Dallas (43.6 percent), according to EPE, which calculates similarly troubling rates for Black students in most cities.

“Nearly every state currently inflates its graduation rates,” said EPE Research Center Director Christopher B. Swanson, “but Texas is a main offender, especially where minority students are concerned. Minority rates are overestimated by 20 points or more. And for students in large cities, graduation rates can be inflated by as much as 35 percentage points.”

According to the EPE Research Center analysis, the Texas rate (66.8) trails the national average of 69.6 percent and ranks 35th among the states. The EPE report was presented at a special conference “The Texas Dropout Crisis and our Children,” held at Rice University in Houston on October 6. At the conference, a collection of national experts and researchers highlighted findings from a range of independent studies that confirm the severity of the dropout situation, suggest its causes and outline potential strategies and policies ...