When Girls Don't Graduate

Oklahoma's alternative education programs served as many girls as boys last year. If you want to know why that might be important, read this post from Jean Warner's Oklahoma Women's Network blog:

An alarmingly high number of girls are dropping out of high school and these female dropouts are at particular economic risk compared to their male counterparts, according to a report by the National Women’s Law Center.

Released November 2, 2007, When Girls Don’t Graduate, We All Fail: A Call to Improve High School Graduation Rates for Girls, finds that American girls are dropping out of high school at nearly the same rate as boys, and at even greater economic cost. Female dropouts earn significantly lower wages than male dropouts, are at greater risk of unemployment, and are more likely to rely on public support programs.

When Girls Don’t Graduate finds that close to half of the estimated dropouts from the Class of 2007 were female students, or over 520,000 of the overall 1.2 million high school dropouts. Overall, an estimated one in four female students will not graduate with a regular high school diploma in the standard, four-year time period.

The rates are even worse for girls of color. Nationwide, 37 percent of Hispanic, 40 percent of Black, and 50 percent of American Indian or Alaskan Native female students respectively failed to graduate in four years in 2004. While girls in each racial and ethnic group fare better than their male peers of the same race or ethnicity, Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaskan Native female students graduate at significantly lower rates than White and Asian-American males.

Read the report When Girls Don’t Graduate
and the National Women’s Law Center's press release.