One of President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign promises was his pledge to improve high school graduation rates as part of his "Race to the Top" initiative. He also set a goal to make the United States "first in the world again" in graduation rates.
Since our last update, all states have adopted the use of the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate. This metric tracks a group of students in a single high school for the duration of their education and records how many graduate, while adjusting for transfers and students that leave the state.
The adoption of the new standard is important because it allows federal officials and statisticians to better compare graduation rates between different states and gives us a clearer picture of the overall trendline. So what does the newest data show?
Graduation rates continued to increase under Obama's presidency. He triumphantly announced earlier in October 2016 that the high school graduation rate reached a new high of 83.2 percent during the 2014-15 school year, a 4.2 percent increase compared to the end of his first term.
Source: Whitehouse.gov
The White House's press release notes that the gains were spread out among a wide variety of student groups, as shown in the chart above. The government draws its data from the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics.
The center's latest report for the 2013-14 school year doesn't include the more recent 83.2 percent figure, but confirms the numbers presented for 2013-14. It also shows that according to an older measure called the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate, the graduation rate increased from 80 percent in the 2010-11 period to 82 percent in 2012-13.
"We're pretty confident that the increase in the graduation rate is real," said Phillip Lovell, vice president of policy development and government relations at the Alliance for Excellent Education, an education advocacy group. "The increase has been consistent over time . . . We have every reason to believe that more kids are graduating now than when Obama took office."
According to Lovell, the focus on improving rates began with a bipartisan agreement between state governors in 2005, and was later codified into law in 2008 by the Bush administration. Obama built on George Bush's accomplishments by making the regulations even stricter, such as introducing a new law requiring high schools with at least a third of students not graduating to implement comprehensive reform.
Despite these domestic gains, the United States still lags behind other rich countries when it comes to high school graduation rates.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2016 report on global education shows that based on 2014 data, the United States has a first-time graduation rate of 82 percent and ranks 23rd out of 37 developed countries. In comparison, the previous year's report ranked the United States 17th out of 26, with a rate of 80 percent. The best-performing countries in 2014 were Portugal and Finland.
Andreas Schleicher, deputy director of education for the OECD, explained to WAMU Radio in 2012 that the lack of improvement wasn't due to any drop in the U.S. graduation rate. Instead, other developed countries improved faster and pursued more aggressive strategies to boost their numbers.
High school graduation rates certainly improved over the course of Obama's presidency, but the United States still consistently ranks in the bottom half of wealthy countries in the measure. We rate Obama's promise as Compromise.