Florida Map Reveals Areas With Most High School Dropouts

A map shows which counties in Florida have the highest percentage of high school dropouts.

Newsweek analyzed the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which tracked the number of residents aged 25 and over with at least a high school diploma, to determine which of Florida's 67 counties had the highest percentage of dropouts.

Hendry County, which has a population of around 40,000, had the highest percentage of dropouts at 31 percent.

Other small counties in Florida also had relatively high numbers of leavers: DeSoto and Glades Counties had 27 percent, Hamilton County had 23 percent and Union and Hardee Counties had 22 percent.

Three larger counties—Leon, Okaloosa and St. Johns—tied with just 5 percent of residents not having at least a high school diploma.

In Florida's most populous county—Miami-Dade County, which has more than 2.6 million residents—just 16 percent of residents do not have high school diplomas.

Just 11 percent of people in Broward County, the second most populous county with almost 2 million people, do not have high school diplomas.

Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted that Florida's 2022-23 graduation rate had hit a record high of 88 percent.

"Florida's graduation rate continues to climb because our educators place a sole focus on academics in the classroom," DeSantis said in a statement in January. "Whether Florida students choose a four-year university or non-traditional post-secondary learning, they will have built a strong foundation to set them up for success."

Teachers in the state had almost the lowest average salaries of any state that year, according to a report by the National Education Association, despite the state facing a worsening shortage of educators.

Florida is struggling to recruit and retain teachers at a time when students are still working to recover from the huge learning setbacks that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, while rates of chronic absenteeism have shot up in recent years.

Jennifer Lansford, a research professor of public policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, previously told Newsweek that students who end up dropping out of high school could face adverse ramifications well into adulthood.

"The long-term consequences of dropping out of high school can be very negative for individuals who drop out, their families, and society as a whole," Lansford said.

She pointed to research that she and colleagues carried out using data from children that were followed from the age of 5 until 27.

That research found that individuals who dropped out of high school were nearly four times more likely to be receiving government assistance; were twice as likely to have been fired two or more times; and were more than three times more likely to have been arrested since the age of 18.

Florida Counties