There is a black-Latino graduation gap in Connecticut schools

Two-thirds of black students, but only half of Hispanics, graduated from Wilbur Cross High School in four years in 2011. At Wilbur Cross, New Haven's largest high school, 48.1% of Hispanic students earned a diploma within four years, compared to 65.4% of black students. The 1,290-student school was 47% Hispanic and 39% black that year. The city's second-biggest high school, James Hillhouse, also showed a significant racial gap: one third (33.8%) of Hispanic students got a diploma within four years, compared to 55.8% of blacks. The same gap persisted at the rest of the city's nine high schools, except Metropolitan Business Academy and High School in the Community (HSC), where Hispanics graduated at a higher rate than blacks, and Sound School, which had too few black students to report that figure. New Haven's numbers reflect a larger trend: In Connecticut, 64% of Hispanics graduated within four years, compared to 71% of blacks and 89% of whites, according to a national database using a new, more accurate four-year cohort measurement for the Class of 2011. Though based on a different calculation, data from the National Center for Education Statistics the Class of 2010 showed a similar gap nationwide: 15.1% of Hispanics dropped out of high school, which was three times the rate of whites and nearly twice the rate of blacks. "We've long known our Latino students are faring worse than our African-American students," both on tests and dropout rates, said Patrick Riccards, CEO of the education watchdog group ConnCAN.