A research study presented Tuesday revealed that only about 50 percent of the students in the largest U.S. cities graduate from high school, which is a lower percent than the one in suburban high schools.

Editorial Projects in Education Research Center issued a report which shows that 75% of the students in the suburban districts received diplomas, while only 58 percent of the students in urban districts did.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the gap is even wider in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where 78 percent of the students in suburban areas graduated and only 57 percent of those in city districts did.

The study involved graduates in the 2003-2004 school year, from the country’s 50 most populated cities. The results showed that the city with the worst drop-out rate was Detroit, in Michigan, where only about 25 percent of students finish the 12^th grade and receive diplomas. Following Detroit is Baltimore, with only around 34 percent graduation rates. Ironically, these two cities receive some of the highest per-student funding in the United States.

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared the dropout rate of more than a million students each year as a “catastrophe.”

The U.S. Department of Education said the results are also due to the lack of a uniform method to report graduation data. Apparently, schools use different methods to calculate graduation numbers. Some of them only count the dropouts who fill a form, while others count all 12^th graders as graduates.

“The problem is frequently masked by inconsistent and opaque data-reporting systems,” Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said, according to Los Angeles Times. “For example, in some districts, a school only counts a dropout if you register as a dropout. . . . In others, a dropout's promise to get a GED at an unspecified future date is good enough to merit graduate status.”

As a solution, the U.S. Department of Education called for a uniform graduation rate, so that all schools use the same standard to measure rates of graduation and dropout.