John Bridgeland, former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council & CEO of Civic Enterprises, and Robert Balfanz, Director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, are co-authors of an Executive Brief on high school graduation rates and trends. The pair authored an op/ed on Huffington Post Education March 17, 2015.

Recent research shows there is a clear path out of poverty. Only 2 percent of those who graduate high school, wait to have children until married, and get a full-time job by the age of 21 live in poverty, while roughly 75 percent who do none of these things do.

On the first stepping-stone toward social mobility — getting a high school diploma — the nation continues to make progress, while serious challenges remain in some states and communities.

For decades, high school graduation rates seemed to be immovable: reaching about 70 percent nationally in the 1970s through the early part of this century. In the 1990s, a suite of governors, many from the high poverty states of the south with the lowest graduation rates, made education reform a top priority as an economic imperative…

Read the full text of this op/ed at the Huffington Post.

Learn more about the Building a Grad Nation 2015 Executive Brief here.

Learn more about Pathways from Poverty.