Gist: More high school seniors are ready to graduate

PROVIDENCE – High school seniors across the state are showing improvement in meeting graduation requirements, Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist told the General Assembly in her annual State of Education speech last week.
Gist said 73 percent of this year’s seniors have either passed the math section of the 2013 NECAP assessments or shown enough progress to meet the requirement. That’s up from 60 percent at the same poing a year ago when they were juniors.
“The gap between high school graduation and college- and career-readiness is narrowing,” Gist said in her Jan. 30 remarks. “After 10 years of working toward this moment, this is the year our Diploma System is fully in place, and it has already resulted in better-prepared students. We have much more to do … to successfully graduate our seniors, and we will get it done.
“More students today are ready to graduate – and they are much more ready to succeed beyond high school,” she continued. “We are on the right course.”
The improvements, she said, have not been limited to high school.
For the first time, she said, Rhode Island students have scored above the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as The Nation’s Report Card, on all four tests in math and reading.
“This progress has been particularly dramatic in grade 8, where our improvements far exceed the national average,” she said. “Our schools are already making sure that our younger students are increasingly better prepared before they get to high school.” •

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