Note that they are going to try to emulate the schools with a 58% graduation rate. While this is certainly better than the 37% they achieve now, I think the net effect will be to pi$$ Bill & Melinda's money down a RAThole.
When I was in high school, graduation rates were in the 90+% range.
And that was in the snow, after walking 5 miles barefoot, fighting wolves...just kidding. I think it was about the same in the late '60's for my era.
Gosh, when I went to high school, 78% of tenth-graders failed the year, shattering the previous all-time record of 52% set the previous year. (Many of the failures were in both sets, from what I could tell.) I advanced to the eleventh grade on the first try and didn't even do all that much.
Many of the failures (and especially the repeat-failures) could be described best as criminals, whether chronically addicted to drugs, drug traders, regular truants, or those with more violent tendencies. Because they committed their crimes on school property, they were not prosecuted (because of school rules).
These failures generally attended class irregularly, rarely if ever attentively, never studied, made no effort whatsoever, and frequently refused to comply with tests, quizzes, and other bases for grades. By "refused to comply with test," I mean that they did not make a reasonable effort to write vaguely rational answers to the questions asked, sufficiently pertinent to suggest that persons might have read the question, and to give the test to the teacher at the conclusion of the time allotted for such examination. Many cheated regularly.
A very good (and hence rare) ninth-grade teacher explained this phenomenon to me. He had provoked the ire of the school administration for sending notice of intent to fail an all-time record (in 20+ years of teaching) 97% of one of his "regular" classes. Confronted by an administrator during my (honors) class, he explained that when he started teaching, the honors students were here (at the level of his neck) and the regular students were here (at the level of his heart). Nowadays, he continued, the honors students are still where they always were, but the regular students are here (touching his boot).
He then began to detail the litany of various activities that were commonplace in the failing class, noting that they had become more commonplace in recent years: fistfights, book-throwing, obvious hangovers, chatting using vulgar language, generally ignoring the teacher, burning copies of the test rather than writing answers, failure to attend class for weeks on end, hurling scientific equipment across the room, .... Of course, many of these behaviors violated school rules, but with 35 bandits and one student who actually wants to pass the class, handling these disciplinary problems is not easy.
This occurred in 1995.
The point is that a deeply disturbing proportion of today's high-school students students have fallen beyond the ability of teachers and school personnel to instruct them or to influence their behavior. The blame lies on these students themselves, on their parents, and to some extent on the overwhelming proportion of entirely disinterested and incompetent middle-school teachers operating largely without any curriculum whatsoever.