The Choice Channel

“On April 1 America’s Promise Alliance, a coalition of the nation’s education elite, released a report on the school dropout problem, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Conclusion: The dropout situation is considerably worse in big-city schools than in suburban ones. Surely this was no April Fools’ Day joke, because the disparities between education outcomes in inner-city and suburbia are of serious concern. But neither was this exactly stop-the-presses news–statisticians have demonstrated the gap in test scores as well as dropout rates for decades. This particular study, however, drew on U.S. Education Department data to document the difference in high school graduation rates between the nation’s 50 largest cities and their suburbs.” (06/08)