This report presents the number of high school graduates, the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), and the dropout data for grades 9-12 for public schools in school year 2008-09. State Education Agencies report these counts of graduates, dropouts, and enrollments to the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) nonfiscal survey of public elementary/secondary education as part of the Cooperative Education Statistics System established in section 157 of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, part C and the U. S. Department of Education's ED"Facts" data collection system. Although data from seven sequential school years are presented in tables 3 and 7, only comparisons between the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years are presented in the text. Selected findings include: (1) Across the United States, the 50 states and the District of Columbia reported that a total of 3,039,015 public school students received a high school diploma in 2008-09, resulting in a calculated Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) of 75.5 percent (table 1); (2) Across all reporting states and the District of Columbia, the AFGR was highest for Asian/Pacific Islander students (91.8 percent) (table 2); (3) A comparison of data from 2008-09 to data from the prior school year, 2007-08, shows a percentage point or greater increase in the AFGR for 22 states and the District of Columbia (table 3); (4) Across the United States, the 50 states and the District of Columbia reported 607,789 dropouts from high school (grades 9-12), resulting in a calculated overall event dropout rate of 4.1 percent in 2008-09 (table 4); (5) Across all reporting states and the District of Columbia, the calculated dropout rates increased as grade level increased (table 5); (6) Across all 49 states and the District of Columbia that were able to report high school dropouts by race/ethnicity, the calculated dropout rate was the lowest for Asian/Pacific Islander st at 2.4 percent and White students at 2.7 percent (table 6); (7) Comparisons between high school dropout rates in the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years showed an increase of a percentage point or more in two states and the District of Columbia. A decrease by the same margin or greater was found in three states (table 7); and (8) Across the 45 states and the District of Columbia that were able to report high school dropouts by gender, the dropout rate was higher for males than for females at 3.6 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively (table 8). Methodology and Technical Notes are appended. (Contains 8 tables and 8 footnotes.)