Correction: This prepublication draft previously misstated the panel's year coverage and used an unsupported national size rank. Both have been corrected.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools^↗ET graduated 91.8% of its 2024 cohort, the district's highest rate in the complete 2016-2024 package panel. The cohort included 24,927 students, and 22,891 graduated.

The latest rate was 11.4 percentage points above Miami-Dade's 80.4% rate in 2016. Applied to a cohort the size of the 2024 class, that rate difference corresponds to about 2,842 additional graduates.

The trajectory

The panel contains a Miami-Dade value for each year from 2016 through 2024. The rate rose from 80.4% in 2016 to 85.6% in 2019 and 90.1% in 2021. It fell to 88.2% in 2022, then increased to 90.3% in 2023 and 91.8% in 2024.

Miami-Dade's 2024 rate was 2.1 points above Florida's 89.7% statewide rate. In 2016, the district's 80.4% rate was 0.3 points below the state's 80.7%.

The equity story

The rate for students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch was 91.2% in 2024, 0.6 points below the district's overall rate. That was the smallest FRL gap among Florida's 10 largest district cohorts; the other nine gaps ranged from 2.1 to 5.4 points. Florida's statewide FRL gap was 3.5 points.

The small gap is a result, not proof that family income no longer matters. The data does not identify which district practices or student circumstances produced it.

Students with disabilities graduated at 89.6%. English learners graduated at 84.2%, creating a 7.6-point gap from the overall rate. The rate was 90.3% for male students and 93.3% for female students, a 3.0-point difference.

Among the largest

Miami-Dade had Florida's largest 2024 district cohort and ranked third in graduation rate among the 10 largest cohorts. Pasco led at 95.5%, followed by Palm Beach at 92.1% and Miami-Dade at 91.8%.

Miami-Dade's rate exceeded Broward's 89.0%, Orange's 89.3%, Hillsborough's 88.0%, and Polk's 82.2%. The comparison is statewide and cohort-based; it does not establish a national rank.

What the panel establishes

Across eight consecutive annual transitions, Miami-Dade's rate increased in seven and declined once. The 2024 value was the panel high, while the 2016 value was the low. Those findings describe a sustained long-run increase with one interruption; they do not explain its cause.

Detailed code that reproduces the analysis and figures in this article is available exclusively to EdTribune subscribers.