It was great to see Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson give attention in his Saturday column to President Obama’s announcement last week of a $12 billion initiative to support US community colleges. But Jackson lost me when he offered hope that local officials will leverage the federal initiative to win added funding for Boston community colleges from foundations and other sources “instead of making Bunker Hill and Roxbury community colleges easy, perpetual whipping posts for low graduation rates in the face of a complex student body that elite colleges need not contend with.”

The abysmal graduation rates at Boston community colleges, which we explored in this 2007 cover story in CommonWealth, are a huge issue, and if the schools have become “perpetual whipping posts” because of this, it’s because their students are paying such a high price for the failure of these institutions to award more degrees in a timely manner. What’s more, Jackson’s criticism of the focus on graduation rates is more than a little ironic, given the name of the new Obama proposal — The American Graduation Initiative — which Jackson never cites in his column.

Community colleges have, as Jackson points out, long gotten short shrift when it comes to federal aid to higher education. But the Obama proposal makes it clear that the new support for two-year colleges would come with expectations of improved graduation rates, which is the only concrete indication that it is money well spent and, much more importantly, that students are getting the credentials to succeed in a world where education is increasingly the coin of the realm.