According to research by the children’s advocacy group America’s Promise Alliance founded by former Secretary of Sate Colin Powell, there was a 3.5 percentage point increase nationally in the high school graduation rate from 2001 to 2009. The graduation rate was 75 percent in 2009, meaning 1 in 4 students fails to get a diploma in four years, researchers found. That’s well below the organization’s goal of 90 percent by 2020. Researchers found that the number of “dropout factories,” schools that fail to graduate more than 60 percent of students on time, had dropped by more than 450 between 2002 and 2010, but that 1,550 remain.”Big gains are possible if you work hard at it, and if you don’t focus on it, you’re going to go backward,” said Robert Balfanz, a report author and director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University.

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