A pair of Rockford Register Star reporters recently investigated local graduation rates and GED completion numbers. The news is mixed.
Reporter Corina Curry recently found the Rockford School District experienced an increase of nearly 10 percentage points in graduation rates among minority students. That’s over the past three years. Last year, Hispanic students in Rockford matched the graduation rate of white students.
“[The numbers] are very positive, but they are early. They are very preliminary.”
She notes the district’s overall graduation rate still lags behind the state average.
Curry says the district isn’t doing anything race-specific to close the achievement gap, but is trying to work with students of all socio-economic backgrounds.
“There have been organizations like Alignment Rockford that have been getting involved in the school district, making sure it has support, Curry said. "There have been a lot of businesses in the community that have been brought in through the Academy design to help make that connection with students from high school to what [they] are going to be doing after high school.”
But what about those students who never get their diplomas? Reporter Isaac Guerrero found roughlyone out of every six residents 16 and older in Boone and Winnebago counties — 45,000 people — lack a high school diploma or GED.? Guerrero reports that statistic threatens every social, economic and cultural metric that the city is trying to improve.
“This notion that you leave an education up to a school or a teacher really doesn’t hold weight anymore.”
Guerrero found dropouts face a lot of barriers to reaching the academic milestone.
“One of the things about the GED test is that before you can even take the test, you have to take a placement test to see if you are ready to take the test. If you score lower than ninth grade level in reading and math, then you need to go to a pre-GED program. Goodwill has done a pretty good job perfecting a model for those kinds of services.”
He says case management is a critical step in the process.
“A big part of what these case managers do is simply provide positive reinforcement-- encouragement. These are people who are maybe single moms or dads, they have criminal records, perhaps, spotty work history. Their life is tough, just getting up every day and getting a GED may sound easy enough, but for them it’s like climbing a mountain.”
Both reporters say the recent data creates more questions and avenues to look into:
“I know for me, I definitely want to look into some of the alternative programs and the success of those, places like Roosevelt High School in Rockford where they have a GED program where students that weren’t successful in a traditional high school can go there and get their high school diploma, or they can catch up and go back to the original high school," Curry said. "I also really want to try to find out more about these 45,000 adults in this region that don’t have a high school diploma or GED. Just learn specifically about who they are and what the challenges are for most of them.”
“There are conversations happening about solutions, but the conversation isn’t quite there yet. There’s still plenty of conversation about still understanding the nature of this problem because it is so huge,” Guerrero said.
