Education Week is out with a new report on high school graduation rates, and the Pacific Research Institute says that California can learn a lot from it--and from its neighbor, Arizona.

Diplomas Count 2008 reports that Arizona graduates a greater percentage of high-school seniors in every major demographic category. This gap is especially pronounced among black and Hispanic minorities where Arizona graduates up to 14 percent more high school seniors. Further, over the past five years, Arizona schools have improved overall graduation rates by 6 percent while Golden State schools have improved a meager .9 percent.

How does Arizona manage to serve similar populations and achieve better results with less of the tax payers’ money? The difference is school choice.

(By the way, check out the cool mapping tool, which lets you drill down to school district level to find graduation rates for most districts in the country.)