Where did he get that idea?

Education Week’s Politics K-12 Blog picked up on President Obama’s claim in his State of the Union message that raising the minimum high school dropout age to 18 increases high school graduation.

I don’t know where the president got that notion, but my very straightforward analysis of graduation rates in states that have had age 18 laws in place long enough to develop decent trend lines shows the majority of those states have seen no better improvement in their graduation rates than the overall national average rate of improvement. In fact, about half of the age 18 states experienced a DECLINE in graduation rates between 2004 and 2008 (which is the latest year of federal graduation rate data currently available).

Age 18 Dropout Age and Graduation Rate Trends

Raising the dropout age will please one traditional Democratic support group. Although a higher dropout age doesn’t lead to more graduations, it does load more kids into high schools, which requires more union dues paying teachers on staff.