Nearly 402,000 California high school seniors received diplomas last year, raising the state’s graduation rate to 82.3 percent, up 1.3 percentage points from 2014’s class, state schools Supt. Tom Torlakson reported Tuesday.
The graduation rate is calculated on the “cohort” of 488,612 students who started high school in 2011-12 and the 401,957 who had graduated four years later.
“This is encouraging news any way you look at it,” Torlakson said in a statement, “especially since the increase is occurring as we are introducing much more rigorous academic standards.”
The graduation rate has figured prominently in an ongoing debate over how the success or failure of schools are to be measured under the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula, which is aimed at closing the “achievement gap” between poor and “English learner” students and their more privileged classmates.
View Article