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Podcasts Take Two
High school graduation rates in US reach 80 percent for first time
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Apr 28, 2014
Listen • 5:20
High school graduation rates in US reach 80 percent for first time
Despite the good news, today's "Building a Grad Nation" report finds that more improvement from California is needed to reach the goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020.
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Photo by Alex Jagendorf via Flickr Creative Commons
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Despite the good news, today's "Building a Grad Nation" report finds that more improvement from California is needed to reach the goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020.

The high school graduation rate in the U.S. is finally getting a B grade, or maybe a B- depending on your grading scale, according to a new report out today that finds that for the first time in history, 80 percent of high school students in the U.S. are graduating.

Despite the good news, today's "Building a Grad Nation" report finds that more improvement from California is needed to reach the goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020. 

Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara, contributed to the report and joins the show to talk more about it.