MCPS Graduation Rate Drops to 88.7% for 2024-2025 School Year; Down from 91.85% Previous Year

[Anonymous]

SOURCE: https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/press/index.aspx?pagetype=showrelease&id=13549&type=&startYear=&pageNumber=&mode=

The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) released the statewide four-year cohort graduation rates for the Class of 2025. For Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), the four-year cohort graduation rate reached 88.77 percent. While this remains above the statewide average, it represents a decrease from the 91.85 percent in 2024. Of the 13,705 students in the 2025 cohort, 12,166 successfully earned their diplomas within the four-year timeframe.

This decline serves as a critical indicator of the evolving challenges students face and underscores the urgency of our current work. A high school diploma is a 13-year journey where foundational skills are the key to long-term success, and the current figures suggest that student needs have outpaced the support systems provided in recent years. To address these gaps, MCPS is implementing strategies designed to restore academic excellence and reinforce core foundations across the district, guided specifically by the Montgomery Board of Education’s Future Ready Strategic Plan.

On a broader scale, Maryland’s statewide four-year cohort graduation rate for 2025 was 86.44 percent, a slight decrease from the 87.55 percent seen in 2024. These rates, which track students from their freshman through senior years per federal reporting standards, have fluctuated between 85.8 percent and 87.6 percent since the 2020-2021 school year.

Despite the general decline, the state reported encouraging growth in graduation rates for African American students, individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with disabilities. However, the data also highlighted a significant decline among multilingual learners, identifying a key area for targeted intervention.

[Anonymous]

Just gets better and better...

[Anonymous]

Stop passing kids who don’t show mastery of foundational skills. Those students almost always have low attendance rates too.

[Anonymous]

The graduation rate was inflated by the loose grading policy. And by pressuring teachers to pass students. The rate should be 5% lower

[Anonymous]

Criminal leaders produce criminal results. And the current crop of leaders are absolute criminals.

Here comes the “blame the parent” and “blame the student” card from the criminals posing as anonymous fans of the current leadership.

[Anonymous]

Honest question - how can EML learners have the same graduation rates as everyone else? Isn’t education predominantly in English? So they are already at a disadvantage in their learning. And many of them may have come into the US illegally (no judgement) and their families may have bigger problems to worry about than focusing on their children’s education. And who knows what the quality of their education was before they joined MCPS. It seems a tall order to expect their graduation rate to be the same as everyone else’s

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honest question - how can EML learners have the same graduation rates as everyone else? Isn’t education predominantly in English? So they are already at a disadvantage in their learning. And many of them may have come into the US illegally (no judgement) and their families may have bigger problems to worry about than focusing on their children’s education. And who knows what the quality of their education was before they joined MCPS. It seems a tall order to expect their graduation rate to be the same as everyone else’s

That's a complex question, which depends on a number of things: at what grade did the student enroll in US school? Did they change schools with any frequency(which causes learning loss)? What education grade did the student's parents achieve? Are the parents bilingual/biliterate with English skills?

With ICE terror, there seems to be a lot of families moving about, so their children are changing schools, or perhaps disenrolled to stay home.

EML students would have a better chance if MCPS invested in ESL-specific curriculum, and kept them in sheltered instruction for two hours per day through year 3 language class in secondary school.

[Anonymous]

We need to unpack the specifics of the populations that are struggling to graduate. Poverty plays ab big role in this and it doesn't help that Taylor is raising class size in Title 1 elementary schools.

[Anonymous]

I see this as a very positive step towards ending the lies about how many students actually earned the knowledge required to graduate

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I see this as a very positive step towards ending the lies about how many students actually earned the knowledge required to graduate

I'm not sure about that. This number is still inflated and still has lots of kids who are graduating that don't meet what most people would expect in terms of what a high school graduate should be knowledgable.

[Anonymous]

Now that the grading policy has gotten tougher in high school this year, I expect the rate will continue to decline

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Now that the grading policy has gotten tougher in high school this year, I expect the rate will continue to decline

Even with the grading policy change, remember a D is passing. Do you know how easy it is to get a D?

[Anonymous]

Here are the grad rates by county for the Maryland school systems sorted in descending order:

County Name##Grad Rate
Queen Anne's##>= 95.00
Talbot##>= 95.00
Worcester##>= 95.00
Carroll##94.64
Calvert##94.49
Frederick##94.05
Garrett##93.36
Allegany##93.09
Kent##93.08
Harford##91.95
Howard##91.3
Charles##90.32
Saint Mary's##90.01
Washington##89.54
Anne Arundel##88.92
Montgomery##88.77
Cecil##87.7
Wicomico##87.23
Caroline##85.71
Baltimore County##84.3
Dorchester##83.57
Somerset##83.43
Prince George's##78.99
SEED##77.27
Baltimore City##71.71


State:
State##86.44

[Anonymous]

And here are the grad rates by school:

LEA Name##School Name##Grad Rate
Montgomery##Poolesville High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Thomas S. Wootton High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Northwest High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Winston Churchill High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Walt Whitman High##94.94
Montgomery##Bethesda-Chevy Chase High##94.09
Montgomery##Sherwood High##93.75
Montgomery##Clarksburg High##93.57
Montgomery##Walter Johnson High##93.57
Montgomery##Damascus High##93.1
Montgomery##Richard Montgomery High##90.61
Montgomery##Col. Zadok Magruder High##90.33
Montgomery##Quince Orchard High##90.31
Montgomery##James Hubert Blake High##88.69
Montgomery##Rockville High##88.36
Montgomery##Seneca Valley High##86.84
Montgomery##Springbrook High##86.18
Montgomery##Paint Branch High##85.8
Montgomery##Montgomery Blair High##85.45
Montgomery##Albert Einstein High##85.25
Montgomery##Northwood High##85.11
Montgomery##Wheaton High##83.22
Montgomery##Watkins Mill High##82.53
Montgomery##Gaithersburg High##78.64
Montgomery##John F. Kennedy High##72.96
Montgomery##John L Gildner Regional Inst for Children & Adol##58.33
Montgomery##Stephen Knolls School##*
Montgomery##Rock Terrace School##*
Montgomery##Longview School##*


All MCPS:
Schools##88.77

The last several are special schools. So if those are excluded and assuming the schools with >=95 grad rates have close to 100 percent, the grad rate would be about 89.5

But other school systems have special schools too and I assume these special schools have always been included in the grad rate calculations?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And here are the grad rates by school:

LEA Name##School Name##Grad Rate
Montgomery##Poolesville High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Thomas S. Wootton High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Northwest High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Winston Churchill High##>= 95.00
Montgomery##Walt Whitman High##94.94
Montgomery##Bethesda-Chevy Chase High##94.09
Montgomery##Sherwood High##93.75
Montgomery##Clarksburg High##93.57
Montgomery##Walter Johnson High##93.57
Montgomery##Damascus High##93.1
Montgomery##Richard Montgomery High##90.61
Montgomery##Col. Zadok Magruder High##90.33
Montgomery##Quince Orchard High##90.31
Montgomery##James Hubert Blake High##88.69
Montgomery##Rockville High##88.36
Montgomery##Seneca Valley High##86.84
Montgomery##Springbrook High##86.18
Montgomery##Paint Branch High##85.8
Montgomery##Montgomery Blair High##85.45
Montgomery##Albert Einstein High##85.25
Montgomery##Northwood High##85.11
Montgomery##Wheaton High##83.22
Montgomery##Watkins Mill High##82.53
Montgomery##Gaithersburg High##78.64
Montgomery##John F. Kennedy High##72.96
Montgomery##John L Gildner Regional Inst for Children & Adol##58.33
Montgomery##Stephen Knolls School##*
Montgomery##Rock Terrace School##*
Montgomery##Longview School##*


All MCPS:
Schools##88.77

The last several are special schools. So if those are excluded and assuming the schools with >=95 grad rates have close to 100 percent, the grad rate would be about 89.5

But other school systems have special schools too and I assume these special schools have always been included in the grad rate calculations?

Now do a side by side comparison of FARMS rates.