It’s tassel turning time again for more than 7,300 students in the СŷƵ’s 26 public high schools, part of a group of more than 124,000 graduates in 690 public schools across the state, including charter, vocational, cyber and “regular” schools.
The latest data from the state Education Department, which covers the 2023-24 academic year, show the vast majority of those graduates — 121,022 of them statewide and 6,878 in Lehigh and Northampton counties — managed to get their diplomas within four years, with the remaining students completing their coursework in five or six years.
But the state’s numbers also show that there should have been just short of 137,000 diplomas conferred last year, meaning that about 12,500 did not graduate within six years of entering high school, including 11,454 who dropped out of school. The overall six-year graduation rate was 91% last year, while the four-year graduation rate was 88%.
The СŷƵ’s six-year graduation rate was only slightly better, at 92.8%, with 88.1% graduating in four years.
СŷƵ compiled graduation statistics going back five years to see which school systems do best at getting diplomas in hands within four years. The table below shows the rates for all СŷƵ public high schools, with a comparison to their rates for the 2019-20 school year.
While statewide charter school graduation rates are lower than regular districts, the СŷƵ’s charters generally match or exceed rates for local districts. The Executive Education Academy in Allentown has a higher four-year graduation rate than any other СŷƵ school.
The map below shows data for 495 of the state’s 500 public school districts. Select a district to see its numbers. Note that data is aggregated for districts with multiple high schools.
Eight districts managed to graduate every student within four years; three of them (Williamsburg Community in Blair County, Jamestown Area in Mercer and Salisbury-Elk Lick in Somerset) did so two years running.
The Education Department did not publish official rates for the 2020-21 or 2021-22 school years because of pandemic-related learning disruptions.
The СŷƵ district with the highest four-year graduation rate was Northwestern Lehigh, which graduated 98.1% of its 161 students in four years.
The state’s worst rates were in York City (64.4%), Harrisburg (67.4%), Allentown (68.4%), Johnstown in Cambria County (69.7%) and Chester-Upland in Delaware County (70%).
Overall graduation rates have improved slightly, rising from 87.4% in 2019-20 to 88.0% in 2023-24. But the improvement hasn’t been universal or even. The two tables below show the districts that improved and degraded the most over the last five years.
The local districts that improved most were Catasauqua Area, jumping 7.1% since 2019-20 to a 95.8% 2023-24 graduation rate; Bangor Area, which moved up 5.8% to 91.4%; and Southern Lehigh, which improved 4.5% to 97.4% last year. Catasauqua ranks in the top 5% of the state’s districts for its improvement over five years.
At the other end of the spectrum, Allentown School District, which includes most of the city, did worse than 98% of the state’s districts, with its four-year graduation rate sinking 8.9% in five years to 68.4% last year. That’s more than twice the amount Easton Area (down 3.5% to 87.1) or Northampton Area (down 3.3% to 88.4%) fell over five years. Overall, 8 of the area’s 17 districts had lower graduation rates in 2023-24 than they did in 2019-20, while 9 districts saw their rates improve.
The state publishes data for the three main kinds of public high schools: charter, career and technology centers, and regular school districts. The table below shows the graduation success for each type.
Although all three categories have shown improvement, the career and technology centers have the best four-year graduation rates by far, with almost 98% of students matriculating in four years. School districts graduate close to 90% of their students in four years, while charter schools graduate fewer than 3 out of 4 students in the same period.
Dropouts
The Education Department also tracks students who leave school. While graduation rates are tracked by high school, dropout rates are tracked for grades 7-12. A student is considered to have dropped out if, for any reason other than death, they disenroll from a school before graduating without transferring to another school or institution.
It stands to reason that the school types with the highest graduation rates also have the lowest dropout rates. That is borne out in the 2023-24 data.
The numbers for the last school year show that charter schools have the highest dropout rates — more than 15 times higher than career and technology centers — and almost three times higher than school districts.
The dropout rates for regular school districts range from 0% in 44 districts (none in the СŷƵ) to 7.74% in York City, which is followed by Woodland Hills in Allegheny County (5.51%) and Harrisburg (5.11%). Allentown’s 3.2% rate ranks it 17th among the 495 districts for which data is available.
The СŷƵ’s nine charter schools fall on both ends of the spectrum. Innovative Arts Academy Charter School’s 7.11% dropout rate is more than twice ASD’s 3.2%, but six other charters are the only local districts or charters with no dropouts. The aggregate dropout rate for local charter schools is 0.96%, less than one-third the statewide rate for public charters.
The map below shows the data for all 495 public school districts.
