Abstract

The nation's dropout rate reached crisis levels in 2009, and test scores posted by its poorest public schools were also grim. Only 70 percent of first-year students entering America's high schools were graduating, with a full 1.2 million students dropping out each school year. In 2009, the Detroit public school system reported math scores that were the worst in forty years of participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. So great was the problem of "low performing" schools by 2010 that the U.S. Department of Education set up ten regional advisory committees "to collect information on the educational needs across the country" and President Barack Obama committed $3.5 billion to fund schools that were doing particularly poorly.

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