This year, one-in-four public elementary school students is Latino, an indication that the young Latino population is growing quickly. But, Latino students still lag behind their white peers in high school graduation rates across the country, according to preliminary data released last week by U.S. Department of Education.
The report shows that in a state-by-state breakdown of high school graduation rates, Hispanic students were less likely to graduate from high school than whites and Asians in all but two states over the 2010-2011 school year. Maine and Hawaii, where Hispanic students had slightly higher graduation rates than their white peers, are the only exceptions to the troubling data. While the department of education says the estimates are more reliable than prior data, because all states had to use the same "rigorous measure" for the first time, Idaho, Kentucky, and Oklahoma did not meet the deadline for data submission, making the dataset for the entire nation technically incomplete. Puerto Rico also was not included.
Of the states that did submit, however, Minnesota has the largest Hispanic achievement gap with Latinos lagging 33 percent in graduation rate than their white counterparts. Only 51 percent of Latinos graduated from high school in the state (the worst Latino graduation rate of any state), whereas 84 percent of whites graduated from high school in the same state. Our nation's capitol, the District of Columbia had the second biggest achievement gap, with 30 percent. READ MORE
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