Here’s the good news: High school graduates are on the rise nationally, with 36 of 50 states saying they graduated more students this year than last year. It’s also nice to see the disparity between white and minority students—the latter of which tend to have lower graduation rates than the former—isn’t nearly as wide as it used to be.

Here’s the bad news: Despite the fact that more youth are graduating these days, they might not know as much when they receive their diplomas. Common Core test results continue to go down, not up.

Alabama’s a great example of this two-sided educational coin. While the state saw 86.3 percent of its high schoolers graduate on time in 2014—a 6.3 percent increase from the previous year—those same students often flopped in their Common Core testing: The results indicate that fewer than half of those students are ready for college. (Slate)