Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn released the spring 10th grade WASL scores today, as well as graduation rates for the Class of 2008. And the news isn’t all bad, although it’s not all good either.
First the good news: 93 percent of the Class of 2009 has passed the Reading and Writing WASLs. Although not a graduation requirement, 73.4 percent of 12th graders have passed the Math WASL, an improvement from previous years.
Now, the bad news: We continue to have a dropout problem in this state — 21.4 percent of the Class of 2008 dropped out of high school. That in and of itself is disappointing, but what is even more depressing is the dropout rate broken out by subgroup. While 18.7 percent of White students dropped out, 29.6 percent of Latino, 32.5 percent of African American and 40.8 percent of Native American students dropped out. This is not OK.
