The good news in “Building a Grad Nation,” a just-released study on graduation rates by the Alliance for Excellent Education, is that over the past decade the number of “dropout factories” decreased 29 percent nationwide, the first such “significant, sustained improvement” in 40 years. The U.S. is now on pace to reach a 90 percent high school graduation rate by 2020, a feat now achieved only in Wisconsin and Vermont.

The bad news is that here in the nation’s capital, “the number of ‘dropout factory’ high schools … shot up in the past decade, defying state trends nationwide,” as The Washington Examiner‘s Matt Connolly reported Monday.