Two months into the new decade and Oregon’s Department of Education has provided the state with great news: high school graduation rates increased, topping-off at 83.7 percent for students who graduated in four years.
As Oregon Public Broadcasting quantified, this equates to “an increase of 600 students in the Class of 2019 who received a diploma, compared to 2018.”
This figure is for students who started in 2014 as reported in ODE’s “summary of 2018-19 four-year and five-year cohort graduation and completer rates” published Jan. 23.
The four-year cohort, as they describe, is “made up of the students who first entered high school in 2015-2016.” Five-year cohorts are those who graduate after participating in a fifth-year program.
For 2019, fifth-year students had an 86.3 percent graduation rate. In the past ten years, especially following Oregon’s Student Success Act, the high school graduation rate has steadily gone up from just above 67 percent but has consistently remained one of the nation’s lowest — ranking 49th out of the fifty states in recent memory according to an OregonLive report.
