The South Is America's High-School Dropout Factory

...and that's just the beginning of this glance at high school and college graduation rates across the U.S. If you dug into these dropout rates, no doubt you'd find layers of ACEs and few support systems. This is another reason for making sure schools become trauma-informed. They're the best defense against kids dropping out of school. Most just don't know that yet. 

Jordan Weissman, senior associate editor at the Atlantic.com, used the U.S. Census data mapping tool to create the maps.

First, high school. This map shows the percentage of adults over 25 who have earned a diploma or finished an equivalency program across each county in the lower 48 states. The darker the shade of orange, the higher the graduation rate. Notice the giant pale underbelly stretching below the Mason Dixon line from the Southeast through Texas. That's our Southern dropout belt, where completion rates are largely below 85 percent. The national average, for reference, is about 87 percent.    

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/the-south-is-americas-high-school-dropout-factory/282480/