Education: High school graduation rates

What does this measure?

  • The on-time graduation indicator is a measure of the percentage of students entering ninth grade who receive a regular high school diploma on schedule four years later. Students receiving GED diplomas are counted as dropouts in this measure.

Why is it important?

  • High school graduation is a fundamental building block for the next stages, whether that is work experience, workforce training, or college. Those who achieve at least a high school degree have better economic prospects and are less likely to require social services.
  • Nationally, the unemployment rate for those without a high school diploma is more than 60 percent higher  than that of high school graduates. Those without a high school diploma have incomes over 30 percent less than high school graduates with no college.

How is Washington doing?

  • In the last three school years for which there are data, the on-time graduation rate has been above 70 percent.

What is state government’s role?

  • State funding makes up almost 70 percent of school districts revenues. This funding pays for a number of basic services that are delivered by local school districts, including regular classroom instruction, alternative education programs, remediation services, and others.
  • In addition, state funding has piloted and implemented numerous programs specifically targeted at retaining high school students, such as the Navigation 101 program, Building Bridges program which provides grants to develop a statewide comprehensive dropout prevention, intervention and retrieval system, and expanded remediation services through Promoting Academic Success and Learning Assistance programs.

Graph & Data Set

Graphical Image of Data. Data in table below.

  High school graduation rates

2002-03

66%

2003-04

70%

2004-05

74%

2005-06

70%

2006-07

72%

For more information…
Contact: Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction