What a game! In the closing minutes of the NCAA Men’s Basketball finals, Stanford edged Davidson College while thousands cheered and….

Not the game you watched last night? Well, it might have been if you were rating the teams’ graduation rates, not their basketball prowess. The analysis of the 64 tournament teams was done by Education Sector and noted recently in a Washington Post opinion piece by Ted Mitchell and Jonathan Schorr, chief executive and partner, respectively, for NewSchools Venture Fund.

Every year we do something like this: We lament the dismal graduation rates of big-time college athletes (and African-American athletes, in particular) then sit back and shamelessly enjoy the game. That’s bad enough. But, as Mitchell and Schorr note in their column, it’s not just athletes who are having trouble graduating, and the problem doesn’t start in college.

According to a study by America’s Promise Alliance, just 53 percent of African-American students are even completing high school. Look the overall gradation rates in some urban school systems -- Cleveland, 34 percent; Detroit, 25 percent -- and the statistics are even more alarming.

We know that dropping out of school is a process, an accumulation of failures that begins long before a student decides to leave school. And while the problem may be most acute in the urban areas mentioned above, no district -- urban, rural, or suburban -- is exempt.

At NSBA’s 68th National Conference in Orlando last week, I facilitated a roundtable discussion about this very issue, how to help those whom ASBJ has called “Children at Risk.” We had representatives from large and small districts, from places like Broward County, Fla., Seattle Wash., Dubuque, Iowa, and Rochester, N.Y. In future blogs I’ll share their concerns and some of the solutions we discussed to perhaps the biggest problem facing education today.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor