Game Changer! N.O. High School Grad Rate Outperforms US

With the recent release by the U.S. Department of Education of national high school completion rates, New Orleans has cause to celebrate.  In terms of graduating students on time, we have closed the performance gap.

New Orleans outperformed the state and outperformed the nation. 

States are now required to use a common measurement for high school completion:  the percent of first time 9th graders who graduate within 4 years with a regular diploma (the 4-year cohort graduation rate1). The data on the graduating class of 2011 shows that nationally 76% of white students and 60% of black students graduated on time.

In New Orleans, 76.5% of our students graduated on time2

  • Outperforming the national average for white students
  • Outperforming the national average for black students by 16.5 percentage points
  • Outperforming the state of Louisiana (70.9%)
  • Outperforming Jefferson Parish (67%), Baton Rouge (62.3%) and Shreveport (61.5%)

New Orleans had 2,051 high school graduates in 2011, 443 more than if we were at the national average for black students, and 657 more than if we were still at New Orleans’ 2005 graduation rate.

This improvement is a game changer for our students and our city. 

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More New Orleans Graduates College and Career Ready

One of the key goals of K-12 education is to give our students the educational foundation they need to be college or career ready. In Louisiana, we have a good benchmark to measure this preparedness – what percent of our students qualify for TOPS, a program that provides two- and four-year merit-based scholarships to Louisiana public colleges and universities.

Educate Now! recently reviewed the TOPS data, and New Orleans continues to close the gap.

  • The percent of Orleans Parish public school students eligible for TOPS scholarships (two- or four-year) has grown from 24.9% in 2005 to 37.2% for last year’s graduates – a gain of 12.3 percentage points.
  • During this same time, the state average grew only 5.2 percentage points, from 37.3% in 2005 to 42.5% in 2011. Continue reading