Giving Compass' Take:

• Jon Marcus discusses how local civic business leaders and grassroots organizations are helping and supporting education reform and student success rates. 

• According to this article, "high school graduation rates in Mobile are way up, from 55 percent before 2011 to 86 percent in 2018." What are local leaders doing to boost education in your community?

• Here's how billionaires co-opt minority groups into campaigning for education reform. 

Among other things, the boosters who pitched international companies to come and do business in this port city promised that its high quality of education would guarantee a steady supply of skilled employees.

Lots of students appeared to be graduating from area high schools. Not just one but two public community colleges seemed to be feeding into a four-year state university, which was putting up lots of new buildings and staging big annual commencements.

The pitches worked. Among the companies that took Mobile up on its offer were the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus and the Norwegian engineering company Aker Solutions. The Finnish stainless-steel producer Outokumpu built a state-of-the-art mill.

Then a local education foundation discovered that those high school graduation rates were based on a formula that made them look much higher than they actually were — nearly 20 percentage points below the national average.

That gave rise to a closer look at the community colleges, where things turned out to be equally bad. Nearly half of entering students failed to return for a second year, and one school was graduating only between 11 and 14 percent of them within even three years.

Read the full article about grassroots helping students succeed by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.