A report released by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center in Bethesda, Md., found that only 47.5 percent of Ohio’s black public school seniors graduated on time. Based on the most recent data available for the state of Ohio from 2007, Ohio’s public schools are losing about half of their African American students students prior to graduation, making it the eighth worst state in graduating African American students.
On average, the national graduation rate for African American students is 53.7 percent according to the same study. This is compared to white, non-Hispanic students’ graduation rates, which averaged 76.6 percent and 80.7 percent for white, non-Hispanic and Asian students nationwide.
Experts have outlined many factors for these dropout statistics, including poverty, incarceration and pregnancy. Regardless of these factors, given the difficulty that African Americans have in finding employment in the current economic environment, more focused attention needs to be directed toward this problem, preferably during the early and formative years of the education process.
–torrance stephens, ph.d.
