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 |  Subject: SHOCK Report: 1 in 4 California high school students dropped out in 2006-07, state says  Wed Jul 16, 2008 10:16 pm | |
| The state, using a new system for tracking dropouts, discloses a rate considerably higher than previously reported. About 1 in 3 students in Los Angeles Unified left school.
Deploying a long-promised tool to track high school dropouts, the state released numbers Tuesday showing that one in four California students quit school in the 2006-07 school year, and one in three in Los Angeles. The rates are considerably higher than previously acknowledged but lower than some independent estimates.
The figures are based on a new statewide tracking system that relies on identification numbers that were issued to California public school students beginning in fall 2006.
The ID numbers allow the state Department of Education to track students who leave one school and enroll in another, even if it is in a different district or city. In the past, the inability to accurately track such students gave schools a loophole, allowing them to say that departing students had transferred to another school when, in some cases, they had dropped out.
The new system promises eventually to provide a far better way to understand where students go, and why. But state and school district officials acknowledged that the data initially available Tuesday -- after a final one-day delay -- were limited in usefulness.
"I think as the system stabilizes, you will get better data," said Esther Wong, assistant superintendent for planning, assessment and research in the Los Angeles Unified School District. For now, she said, the numbers tell only part of the story, albeit more accurately than in the past.
Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction, presented the new data as a quantum leap forward in understanding the nature of the dropout problem. But, he said, "no one will argue that the number of dropouts is good news. . . . It represents an enormous loss of potential."
State data analysts were able to come up with a four-year "derived" dropout rate, which estimates how many students drop out over the course of their high school careers.
For the state overall, it was 24.2%, up substantially from the 13.9% calculated for the previous school year using an older, discredited method. Statewide, 67.6% of students graduated and 8.2% were neither graduates nor dropouts. The last category included those who transferred to private schools or left the state.
For the Los Angeles Unified School District, the new dropout rate was 33.6%, changed from 25.3%.
Critics, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, have said that as many as half of Los Angeles Unified students drop out, based largely on a reverse reading of graduation numbers. On the other hand, a recent report by an independent research group, Policy Analysis for California Education, put the district's dropout rate at 25.7%.
O'Connell said he was particularly concerned by the latest figures for African American and Latino students. The state data show that 41.6% of black students and 30.3% of Latino students had dropped out in 2006-07, compared with 15.2% of white students and 10.2% of Asian students.
"This is a crisis," he said.
In Los Angeles, African American students dropped out at a lower rate than their counterparts statewide. That was not true of the other three groups.
The data show dropout rates for individual schools. Among large, comprehensive high schools in Los Angeles, the highest dropout rates were recorded at Jefferson High School, at 58%; Locke High, 50.9%; Crenshaw, 50%; and Roosevelt, 49.6%.
Those with the lowest rates were Palisades Charter High, 2.5%; Granada Hills Charter, 6.4%; Canoga Park, 11%; Cleveland, 12.8%; El Camino, 13%; Taft, 13.1%; Chatsworth, 14.5%; and Fairfax, 14.9%.
State officials acknowledge that even the latest Department of Education figures are less than ideal. The four-year rate is based not on students' actual progress over four years of high school but on an assessment of one year's worth of data for all four grades. That will remain the case until spring 2011, when data are released for the 2009-10 school year based on students' actual journey over four years.
Moreover, it remains impossible to say with certainty why students left school because codes designed to explain that, listing choices such as "graduated," "died" and "no show," are based on a different period of time than the dropout rate itself. Eventually, the two sets of figures will be synchronized, but the state was unable to do that in time for the release of the latest dropout figures.
"It just has basically come down to time and resources here," said Karl Scheff, a state education research and evaluation administrator.
O'Connell released the data at a news conference at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, choosing the school because it was the focus of a Times series on dropouts in 2006.
Among those applauding the new system was Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the incoming president pro tem of the state Senate, who successfully wrote legislation, SB 219, that will require schools to include dropout rates in their Academic Performance Indexes.
"It's undeniable that what counts, matters," Steinberg said. "And now with this data and Senate Bill 219, the dropout rate will finally count."
Some numbers in the new data stream are open to misinterpretation. For instance, some continuation schools -- which cater to the most troubled students -- show dropout rates of greater than 100%. That is because their enrollment figures are based on the enrollment on a single date in October, but such schools typically have students who come and go throughout the year, so more students can drop out by June than were enrolled in the fall.
Nevada County, a semirural swatch of Northern California whose schools generally perform well, showed a dropout rate of nearly 77%. The explanation, Associate Supt. Stan Miller said, is that the county charters one of the largest dropout recovery programs in California, with campuses spread throughout the state but reported as if they were in Nevada County. Even the most successful of such programs, which target students who already have dropped out of school at least once, have high dropout rates, and the Nevada County program is large enough to outweigh the relatively low dropout rate of the county's regular students.
What is inescapable, ultimately, is that the effort to statistically capture the complications of teen life does not lend itself to the sort of simple analysis that a dropout rate suggests.
For instance, Susana Garcia, 18, counts as neither a dropout nor a graduate but as a "completer" because she elected to take the general educational development test, or GED, rather than earn a diploma.
Garcia had started off at University High, then transferred to Hollywood High. She fell far behind in course credits and had already started working at a coffee shop near Beverly Hills. In the near term, she wanted something to show for both her time in school and her resolve to improve herself.
"Obviously, people ask you, 'Did you graduate or do you have your diploma or GED?' " she said. "I don't want to be seen as a failure -- or a complete failure." She added: "In my mind, I still want to go back and get the diploma."
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