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TOPEKA, May 11, 2007 / The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on May 8, 2007, released event dropout rates for public school students in grades 9-12 for the years 2002-03 and 2003-04 as reported by state education agencies in the Common Core of Data (CCD) annual report.

Kansas High School Dropout Rate Among Best in Nation

 

TOPEKA, May 11, 2007 / The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on May 8, 2007, released event dropout rates for public school students in grades 9-12 for the years 2002-03 and 2003-04 as reported by state education agencies in the Common Core of Data (CCD) annual report. For the 2002-03 school year, all 50 states and Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands reported dropout data in agreement with the CCD definition. The District of Columbia did not report. For the 2003-04 school year, the District of Columbia, Wisconsin, and Oregon did not report.

 

Highlights of the 2002-03 Report:

• For the 2002-03 school year, event dropout rates for public high school students ranged from a low of 1.8 percent in New Jersey to a high of 8.5 percent in Arizona.
• In 2002-03, the state rates show that event dropout rates were less than 3 percent in eight states: New Jersey, Iowa, Wisconsin, Connecticut, North Dakota, Indiana, Kansas, and Maine. Kansas had a 2.4 percent event dropout rate. 
• Five states had event dropout rates for 2002-03 of more than 6 percent.
• Combined, the event dropout counts for the 50 states in 2002-03 indicate that nearly 555,000 9^th – 12^th grade students dropped out of public high schools during the course of a single year.

 

Highlights of the 2003-04 Report:

• For the 2003-04 school year, event dropout rates for public high school students in the reporting states ranged from a low of 1.8 percent in Connecticut and New Jersey to a high of 7.9 percent in Louisiana.

• In 2003-04, ten states had event dropout rates of less than 3 percent for the year. These states were New Jersey, Connecticut, North Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, Vermont, Nebraska, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi. Kansas had a 2.2 event dropout rate for the year, showing a 0.2 percent decrease from the previous year.
• As well as Louisiana, four other states had rates of more than 6 percent.
• These rates translate into a count of nearly 555,000 9^th – 12^th grade students who dropped out of our public high schools during the 2003-04 school year.

 

Event dropout rate provides a measure of the percentage of high school students who drop out of high school during the course of a given year. As such, it is useful for studying what happened to a particular group of high school students in a single year. The state dropout rate is calculated by summing the number of dropouts for the state in a given year and dividing this sum by the number of students enrolled at the beginning of that school year. 

                                                                              

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