Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation

This report takes a geographically-informed approach to the issue of high school completion. Specifically, the authors examine graduation rates in the school districts serving the nation's 50 most-populous cities as well as the larger metropolitan areas in which they are situated. Results show that graduation rates are considerably lower in the nation's largest cities than they are in the average urban locale. Further, extreme disparities emerge in a number of the country's largest metropolitan areas, where students served by suburban systems may be twice as likely as their urban peers to graduate from high school. (author)