This June, the Department of Education and the mayor proudly announced that New York City’s high school graduation rates have broken records and increased for the tenth year in a row to 65.5 percent. The Bronx separately trails behind each of the other four boroughs with a rate of 57.5 percent.

However, these numbers refer to the percentage of students who graduated by August 2011, after three months of summer school. If only June graduations are counted, as with the state’s rates, the citywide rate actually went down slightly from 61 percent to 60.9 percent, the first time in years that it has not significantly increased.

Bloomberg, who took over control of the school system in 2002, put a positive spin on it, suggesting that the number of students graduating is impressive considering the higher standards of the Department of Education under his administration.

“Overall, the trend continues to be positive,” he said in a statement. “More and more students are graduating, even as the standards we’re asking them to meet get tougher and tougher.”

With only June graduations counted, the Bronx’s numbers have dropped as well, but more substantially, from 54.7 percent to 52.7 percent.

In the northwest Bronx, the average rate of graduation by August 2011 for local public high schools was 70.4 percent. Without the highest rates from the Bronx High School of Science and High School of American Studies at Lehman College, both of which require an entrance exam for students from a citywide pool, bringing it up, it falls to about 66.5 percent, still higher than the city rate.

The next highest rates after the two top schools are almost 20 percent lower and most of the other local schools’ rates consistently fluctuate or drop. This is roughly the same as the previous year, although only eight out of 17 schools included had numbers below the city’s rate (see chart).

The state, on the other hand, is not impressed with the June 2011 graduation rates and points out that the rate of city high school graduates deemed prepared for college-level work is 20.7 percent, down from last year’s 21.4. City officials use different criteria and put the college-readiness rate at 24.7 percent. The state’s graduation rate went up slightly from 73.4 the previous year to 74 percent in June 2011.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared in the June 28-July 11 print edition of the Norwood News.