Scholars and educators disagree on the rate of graduation in U.S. high schools. The recently released book by Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy, Rethinking high school graduation rates and trends, challenges school administration reporting and conventional wisdom about who is less likely to complete high school.
Some new statistics seriously understate minority graduation rates and fail to reflect the tremendous progress in the last few decades in closing the black-white and the Hispanic-white graduation gaps.
Mishel and Roy review relevant data about diplomas and GED completions by people to age 26 from Censure Bureau door to door interviews.
Paul E. Barton, senior associate and former director of the Policy Information Center at Educational Testing Service, considers their book the most comprehensive review of high school completion.