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WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Campaign for High School Equity, the only coalition of leading civil rights groups to focus on high school education reform, today urged policymakers to ensure productive futures for all students by holding school systems accountable for getting students successfully to graduation.

One third of American students -- about 1.2 million each year -- leave high school without a diploma, and graduation rates for poor and minority students are even lower. Over the past several years, independent researchers have documented significant gaps between graduation rates reported by states and rates projected by independent research.

At a congressional briefing today, speakers discussed the significant need to include meaningful graduation rates in federal school accountability requirements and outlined the personal and societal costs associated with high school dropout rates, especially among poor and minority students. Only 53 percent of African-American students and 58 percent of Hispanic students graduate from high school, compared with 76 percent of white students, according to Editorial Projects in Education.

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) spoke in favor of graduation accountability at the briefing, as did Joseph Garcia, vice president for advocacy and communications at the North Carolina New Schools Project, Raul Gonzalez, legislative director of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), and Gary Huggins, executive director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind.

"Graduation rates are a cornerstone of high school accountability. Holding schools, districts, and states responsible for graduation rates helps discourage schools from 'pushing out' students who might not score highly on achievement tests," said NCLR's Gonzalez, a member of the Campaign for High School Equity. "We don't have a functional public education system in the U.S. if we can't graduate 40 percent of students of color on time. We are still segregated when it comes to schools; we are living in a country of two different school systems."

During the briefing, the Campaign for High School Equity issued four key recommendations for successfully incorporating graduation rates into the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB):

Graduation statistics should be clear, accurate, and comparable across schools, districts, and states. Graduation rate information should be used to inform decision-making and to improve policy and practice around strengthening student outcomes. For those statistics to be valuable, NCLB needs to ensure that educators and policymakers actually know how many students are graduating. This is a critical indicator of high school quality.

Required graduation rate increases should be aggressive but attainable. By choosing to set required graduation rate increases at incredibly low rates (as low as one tenth of a percent in some states), states have demonstrated that the federal government must include meaningful graduation rate growth requirements in the reauthorization of NCLB. If graduation rates are not required to increase annually, generations of students, disproportionately students of color, will continue to be left behind.

Graduation rates should be disaggregated by subgroup so as to ensure that all students benefit from school improvement efforts and activities. By continuing to ignore subgroup graduation rate accountability, citizens,

policy-makers, and advocates have no real way of knowing whether or not students of color and low-income students are actually graduating from high school and at what rates this may or may not be occurring.

Graduation rates should be considered equally as important as high-quality assessments aligned to college and work readiness in determining school quality. Schools cannot be considered successful if large percentages of their students, particularly those who are of color and/or low-income, are dropping out or being pushed out.

For more information about strengthening NCLB to better serve students of color, visit the Campaign's website at http://www.highschoolequity.org/.

The Campaign for High School Equity is a diverse coalition of national civil rights organizations representing communities of color that believe high schools should have the capacity and motivation to prepare every student for graduation, college, work, and life. The Campaign was formed to address the unequal public education system that fails to provide high-quality education to students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods. Members of the Campaign include the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, the National Council of La Raza, the National Indian Education Association, the National Urban League, and the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center. The Alliance for Excellent Education serves as the Campaign's convener and coordinator. Campaign for High School Equity

Web Site: http://www.highschoolequity.org/