1 in 4 California High School Students Drop Out, State Says Page 1 of 3

Los Angeles Times: 1 in 4 California high school students drop out, state says Page 1 of 3

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dropout17-2008jul17,0,1269326.story From the Los Angeles Times 1 in 4 California high school students drop out, state says Using a new system for tracking dropouts, California discloses a rate considerably higher than previously reported. About 1 in 3 students in Los Angeles Unified left school. By Mitchell Landsberg and Howard Blume Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

July 17, 2008

Deploying a long-promised tool to track high school dropouts, the state released numbers Wednesday estimating that 1 in 4 California students -- and 1 in 3 in Los Angeles -- quit school. 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 in California, 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 -- which will cost $33 million over the next three years, in addition to the millions spent for the initial development -- promises to eventually provide a far better way to understand where students go, and why. But state and school district officials acknowledged that the data initially available Wednesday, 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, state superintendent of public instruction, presented the new data, based on the 2006-07 school year, 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.

School districts have until the end of August to correct data, so figures could change.

The statistics highlight a problem that is getting worse in California, said Russell Rumberger, a professor of education at UC Santa Barbara who directs the California Dropout Research Project.

Even using the old system of measurement, he said, the number of dropouts has grown by 83% over five years while the number of high school graduates has gone up only 9%.

"So that's sobering, it's really sobering," he said.

Rumberger attributed the trend to three primary factors: an increase in Latino immigrants, who are among the most likely to drop out; the raising of academic standards; and insufficient funding for public education.

For Los Angeles Unified, the new dropout rate was 33.6%. The rate was 25.3% under the old system in 2005-06.

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Critics, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, have said that as many as half of Los Angeles Unified students drop out. But a recent report by an independent research group, Policy Analysis for California Education, put the district's dropout rate at 25.7%.

O'Connell chose Birmingham High School in Van Nuys for his announcement, noting that it was the focus of a Times series on dropouts in 2006. He said he was particularly concerned by data showing a dropout rate of 41.6% for black students and 30.3% for Latino students, compared with 15.2% for whites and 10.2% for Asians.

"This is a crisis," he said.

In Los Angeles Unified, African American students dropped out at a lower rate than their counterparts statewide. That was not true of the other three groups.

Among large, comprehensive L.A. high schools, the highest dropout rates were recorded at Jefferson, 58%; Belmont, 56%; Locke, 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 figures are less than ideal. The four-year rate is based not on students' actual progress over four years but on one year's worth of data for all four grades. In the spring of 2011, data will be released based on students' actual journey over four years.

Moreover, it remains difficult to say why students left school because codes designed to explain that, listing choices such as "graduated," "died" and "no show," are based on a different time period than the dropout rate itself.

Eventually, the two sets of figures will be synchronized, but the state was unable to do that before the release of the latest dropout figures.

The new system drew accolades even from some critics of the Department of Education.

"Though it has taken far too long and it is only partial progress, we applaud today's advances," said John Affeldt, managing attorney of Public Advocates, which has battled the department in court over the high school exit exam, among other matters.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hailed the data, but said it was important "that we don't just look at numbers."

"It's good information," he said at a briefing for reporters in Sacramento, but "what we need to find out is, what is the reason for the dropouts? . . . We've got to find out what the reason is and then we can work on that to eliminate those problems."

Some of the new dropout numbers are open to misinterpretation. For instance, some continuation schools -- which cater to the most troubled students -- show dropout rates of more than 100%. That is because their enrollment is based 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 have high dropout rates, and the Nevada County program is large enough to outweigh the relatively low dropout rate of the county's own students.

What is inescapable, ultimately, is that the effort to statistically capture the complications of teen life does not lend itself to the simple analysis that a dropout rate suggests.

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.

"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."

mitchell.landsberg

@latimes.com

[email protected]

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This story is taken from Sacbee / Politics.

California high school dropout rate near one- quarter, report says

By Deb Kollars - [email protected] Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, July 17, 2008

A new high school dropout report released Wednesday shows significantly higher rates of students leaving public school in California than reported in previous years.

According to the California Department of Education, one in four high-schoolers – 24.2 percent – failed to graduate or move into another program to continue their education. The estimates were derived from data from the 2006-07 school year.

By contrast, the state claimed a 13.9 percent four-year dropout rate for the prior year.

The difference is due to a more accurate system for keeping track of students, said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. Under the system, students were given a unique identification number that enabled the state to better track their whereabouts in the education system.

It proved an eye-opening effort.

In the past, dropout counts were self-reported by schools and districts. In many places, the figures were considered serious undercounts, especially when compared with the rates of freshmen who actually graduated with their classes four years later.

The Grant Joint Union High School District, for example, reported an 18 percent four-year dropout rate in 2005-06.

Yet, that same year, the district (which recently merged into a new district called Twin Rivers) graduated only 1,232 students – fewer than half of the 2,547 ninth-graders enrolled four years earlier.

For years, such disparities ran up and down the state, leading to calls for reform of the dropout reporting system. Laws passed in 1995 and 2002 paved the way for a more accurate system, but financial and bureaucratic barriers prevented it until this year.

"Thank God we've finally moved in this direction," said Delaine Eastin, who was state superintendent from 1995 until 2003 and advocated for a better tracking system. "It's too little too late, though, for some of these students, these real-life people."

Under the new system, the Grant district showed a 36.2 percent dropout rate – double its prior year's and one of the highest district rates in the Sacramento region.

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The Sacramento City Unified and San Juan Unified districts, by contrast, ran just below the Sacramento County rate of 26.5 percent and slightly above the statewide rate.

"We knew it was high, but this is a startling number," said Frank Porter, superintendent of the Twin Rivers Unified School District, which absorbed Grant and three other districts July 1.

Porter said he was grateful for more reliable statistics: "It will give us a more accurate baseline," he said, noting that Twin Rivers is taking steps to keep more students in school.

The announcement Wednesday that a fourth of California high-schoolers – more than 127,000 teenagers – quit school prematurely left many disturbed.

Rates run even higher for African American and Latino students. And although younger students are not accounted for in the four-year rates, the report shows thousands dropping out as early as seventh and eighthgrades.

"It's plain unacceptable," said state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento. "These are young people who are largely uneducated and unprepared for the high-wage jobs in the new economies of California."

Mary Shelton, associate superintendent at Sacramento City Unified, agreed too many students leave early. She cautioned, though, that the rates listed for individual high schools may overstate dropouts because of mobility factors.

Hiram Johnson High School, for example, had a 35.4 percent dropout rate. But the school also has a huge transfer rate because families move so much.

"It's like a revolving door," Shelton said. "Last year half the kids transferred in or out in the course of the year."

O'Connell said the new system was designed to make better sense of transfers.

In the past, he said, when students left schools saying they were switching to another campus, their schools counted them as transfers, not dropouts, without checking if the students actually re-enrolled elsewhere.

With the new student tracking system, the state was able to determine whether such transfers took place.

If not, such students were deemed "lost transfers" and counted as dropouts. They were a big factor in the uptick in dropout rates.

"Twenty-four percent of students dropping out is not good news," O'Connell said, noting that the more accurate data should lead to greater accountability and more focus on helping students complete school.

Wednesday's report said 8.2 percent of students were considered neither dropouts nor graduates because they moved to a private school, earned a high school equivalency certificate, left the state or died, among other things.

Alan Bonsteel, a Marin physician long critical of the state's dropout counts, said the numbers still are not accurate because they fail to account for middle school dropouts and students

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who move to other states, countries or private schools or leave school for other reasons.

"We're still undercounting," said Bonsteel, president of California Parents for Educational Choice, a nonprofit that advocates for charters and vouchers.

According to the Department of Education, an even more accurate tally will be available when the state launches a longitudinal data system in 2009-10.

It will enable the tracking of individual students over time, rather than producing derived rates based on a single year's data.

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http://www.sacbee.com/111/v-print/story/1088866.html 7/17/2008 SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Education -- Student dropout rate hits 20% Page 1 of 2

More Education news Student dropout rate hits 20%

Superintendent bemoans 'tremendous loss of potential'

By Bruce Lieberman UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

July 17, 2008

More than 1 in 5 public school students in the county will drop out of school by their senior year, new data from the state Department of Education show.

San Diego County fared slightly better than the state, which posted a four-year dropout estimate of 24.2 percent – nearly 1 in 4 students.

The statistics, released yesterday, on the four-year dropout rates are estimates of the percentages of students who would drop out in a four-year period – based on data collected in the 2006-07 school year.

They painted a grim picture of a crisis that educators say exacts an enormous cost on society.

“It represents a tremendous loss of potential,” said Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction.

In the 2006-07 school year, 127,292 students in the state between grades nine and 12 dropped out, the reports says. The total enrollment for those grades was 1,997,181.

The release of dropout data signaled a new era in tracking the progress of the state's public school students. Since June 2005, every student in California has been assigned an identification number that eventually will allow educators to profile academic progress from preschool through high school.

“For years, people have guessed about the real dropout rate, and now we have the best information we have ever had,” said state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who has chaired a legislative committee on the dropout problem.

California's dropout rate has real consequences that reverberate throughout society, according to “Solving California's Dropout Crisis,” a report released in February by the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara.

The state suffers $46.4 billion in total economic losses for every group of 120,000 20-year-olds who never complete high school, the report found.

More than two-thirds of all high school dropouts will use food stamps during their work lives, and the probability of incarceration for a black male dropout is 60 percent, the report also stated.

The new statistics are particularly alarming among California's Latino and black students. An estimated 30.3 percent of Latino students and 41.6 percent of black students drop out between ninth and 12th grade,

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compared with 15.2 percent of white students.

Across San Diego County, 28.8 percent of Latino students drop out during high school, compared with 41.7 percent of black students and 13.6 percent of white students.

Students across the county have benefited from specialized programs designed to help them graduate.

Ramiro Ruiz, 18, of Oceanside is attending an Academic Recovery Center in the Oceanside Unified School District to complete the last few dozen credits he needs to graduate. After years of ditching school, a persistent drinking problem and run-ins with police, he said he wants to earn his diploma this fall and move on to Palomar College to become an electrician. He would be the first among four brothers and two sisters to graduate from high school.

“I know I've messed up a lot, but I have to get my stuff together,” Ruiz said.

In the San Diego Unified District, the county's largest school district, an estimated 30.5 percent of Latino students and 28.7 percent of black students drop out during high school. That's compared with 15.3 percent of white students.

“It's embarrassing, and it's disappointing,” said San Diego Unified Superintendent Terry Grier, who was hired this year. “We are not going to have a school district that has these kinds of dropout numbers.”

Educators in Vista and Julian said their high estimated number of dropouts were skewed either by charter schools in their districts, which operate independent of many education laws, or by dropout rates at alternative high schools, where students already at risk of dropping out are assigned.

Bruce Lieberman: (760) 476-8205; [email protected]

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24% of state high-schoolers likely to drop out Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, July 17, 2008

Nearly 1 in 4 California students will drop out during high school, state educators said Wednesday, basing their prediction on what they said is the most accurate information about student attendance they've ever collected.

Using a new student-tracking system, state educators found that 127,292 high school students in ninth through 12th grade quit school during the 2006-07 school year. That means 24 percent of incoming freshmen won't stay in school long enough to graduate, researchers said, assuming that pace remains steady.

"The dropout rate is a crisis," state schools chief Jack O'Connell said as he released the new data, which show tens of thousands of African American and Latino students abandoning school at far higher rates than other ethnic groups. "Schools will now be held publicly accountable for finding out what happened to students."

The new dropout rate is far higher than the 13 percent educators had earlier estimated using less- sophisticated counting methods they had relied on for years.

"I was quite shocked at how many students are falling through the cracks," said O'Connell. "The dropout crisis is a statewide crisis."

Using its new "Statewide Student Identifier System," the state Education Department has given every student a unique and anonymous identification number. With that, schools can track the whereabouts of missing students for the first time and learn whether students are truly absent without leave or whether they are somewhere legitimate.

Did they leave the state? Join a homeschool? Die? The new system recognizes 29 kinds of student invisibility, 10 of which are counted as dropouts, including "expelled."

One stunning fact learned from the new system was that 53,600 students who said they were transferring to a new school last year never actually showed up.

Another is that the state now knows for the first time that there were 4,609 dropouts who completed all graduation requirements but one: the mandatory exit exam.

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"Today, we have the tools for the first time to report the rates with a much greater degree of accuracy than in the past," O'Connell said.

The superintendent said that having a more accurate picture of the fate of the missing students will help the state target its anti-dropout expenditures more wisely.

Many African American and Latino students could use that help.

Earlier estimates suggested that 10,000 black students would quit. But the expected number is nearly twice as high: 19,440.

For Latinos, the estimate was 37,716 dropouts. The actual number is estimated at 69,035.

These figures translate into astronomical dropout predictions over the next four years: 42 percent for black students and 30 percent for Latinos.

"It's high time we started telling the truth about these numbers," said Russlynn Ali, executive director for Education Trust West, an Oakland group working to raise achievement for students of color. "Federal and state accountability systems don't ask us to do much about changing these numbers. We need to set ambitious targets for all students to increase graduation rates."

California's dropouts cost the state $50 billion per year, said incoming state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who quoted studies showing that over their lifetimes those who quit are more likely to be unemployed, turn to crime, need state-funded medical care, get welfare and pay no taxes.

Fixing the problem "is our most important economic strategy in California," he said.

Bay Area dropout rates vary widely by school district, but three have rates far higher than the 24 percent state average: Oakland Unified (37 percent), West Contra Costa Unified (40 percent), and Vallejo City Unified (42 percent).

"Clearly, a 42-percent dropout rate is unacceptable for an educational institution," said Vallejo schools spokesman Jason Hodge.

In San Francisco, 1,052 high school students quit last year. Based on that, researchers believe that 21 percent of entering freshmen will quit before earning a diploma.

Superintendent Carlos Garcia pointed to numerous existing programs intended to reduce dropouts, but several appeared scant: The district has but 15 "outreach consultants" and seven "attendance liaisons" who make home visits, and just one "stay-in-school coordinator" for high-needs students.

However, the district has a "transition program" to help students who are changing schools and

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programs. State Superintendent O'Connell said the data show that students in transition are most at risk for dropping out.

The new statewide report shows that 351,035 students in the class of 2007 earned a diploma, or 68 percent.

But what happened to everyone else? That's always been the "million-dollar question," said Russ Rumberger, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who has tracked dropouts as director of the privately funded California Dropout Research Project.

Rumberger said he is pleased that the new student ID system gives educators a better spyglass than ever on the whereabouts of missing students.

Not all are dropouts. About 8 percent are "completers" who neither dropped out nor earned a diploma.

Included in that 8 percent are 770 students who died. Nearly 5,000 graduated - but because they were disabled and used modifications to help them pass the exit exam or were exempted from taking it, they earned a certificate of completion rather than a diploma. Nearly 62,000 students moved out of state. And many others entered a medical facility or took a high school equivalency test.

Projected number of s.f. dropouts

A new student ID system let school officials see for the first time how many students in the 2006- 07 school year quit school without enrolling anywhere else or having another legitimate reason for not showing up. Based on those numbers, state education officials calculated what percent of incoming freshmen would drop out before completing high school. Here are figures for San Francisco high schools (alternative schools are excluded because enrollment is transient by design):

School Enrollment % dropouts Leadership High 331 46% International Studies Academy 421 30 Mission High 864 25 John O'Connell Alternative High 819 23 Balboa High 1,098 23 Thurgood Marshall High 642 19 Raoul Wallenberg Traditional H 647 19 Galileo High 2,224 18 Phillip and Sala Burton Academy 1,338 17

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Abraham Lincoln High 2,343 15 June Jordan School for Equity 371 13 George Washington High 2,306 13 School of the Arts 806 11 Gateway High 453 4 Lowell High 2,671 1

Bay area school districts

Based on actual dropout figures for 2006-2007, state education officials calculated the percent of incoming freshmen expected to drop out before completing high school. Here are the dropout rates for selected Bay Area school districts:

County District % dropouts Solano Vallejo City Unified 42.1% Contra Costa West Contra Costa Unified 40 Alameda Oakland Unified 37 Contra Costa Mt. Diablo Unified 22 San Francisco San Francisco Unified 21 Alameda Hayward Unified 19 Santa Clara San Jose Unified 13 San Mateo Jefferson HSD 12 Marin Novato Unified 9

Source: California Department of Education

E-mail Nanette Asimov at [email protected]. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/17/MNS211PQQE.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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For years, the extent of California's dropout crisis Report: 1 in 4 California has been a bit of a guessing game because there was no way to accurately determine if a student had students drop out before dropped out or simply moved and transferred to a graduating different school. Critics charged that schools routinely underestimated their dropout figures.

By Dana Hull Now, each California student has a nine-digit Mercury News "student identifier" that makes tracking them from school to school much easier - and makes it far Article Launched: 07/16/2008 01:11:31 PM PDT harder for school districts to fudge their numbers.

On the Web The statistics are certain to renew calls for z Download: additional state funding for schools. The details z Dropout data from CDE also plainly reveal how vast and entrenched the Dataquest Web site achievement gap - the academic chasm that separates black and Latino students from their white Talk About It and Asian peers - is in schools across the Golden z Compare school experiences State. with other parents in the Education Forum For black students, the dropout rate is a sobering More Education 41.6 percent. Latinos, who make up nearly half of California's public school students and are the z Compare schools on fastest-growing demographic, have a dropout rate tests/rankings and read the latest education news of 30.3 percent. White students have a 15.2 percent dropout rate, while Asians have a 10.2 percent rate.

Because the data released today is the first using Nearly 1 in 4 of California's 6.3 million students the new computerized tracking system, there's no drop out of school, according to new data released way to compare it with previous years. by the state Department of Education today.

While dropouts are often thought to afflict large For the 2006-2007 school year, 67.6 percent of the urban school districts, the crisis touches every state's eligible students graduated and 24.2 percent corner of the state. dropped out. The other 8.2 percent of students - such as those who failed to complete high school In Santa Clara County, the news was only slightly but earned a GED - fall into a third category known less severe. While schools in Silicon Valley generally as "completers." outperform students elsewhere in the state on

standardized tests, 1 in 5 - or 20.2 percent - of "24.2 percent is not OK. 24.2 percent is students drop out before graduation. Locally, the unacceptable to me," said state schools chief Jack dropout rate was highest for Latino students. O'Connell in a teleconference. "It represents a tremendous loss of potential."

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To download state, county, district, and school- level dropout data, visit the Department of Education's DataQuest Web site at: http://dq.cde.ca. gov/dataquest/

Contact Dana Hull at [email protected] or (408) 920-2706.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9900143 7/17/2008 Dan Walters: New numbers won't end California school dropout debate - sacbee.com Page 1 of 2

This story is taken from Sacbee / Politics.

Dan Walters: New numbers won't end California school dropout debate

By Dan Walters - [email protected] Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, July 17, 2008

State schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell unveiled newly calculated high school dropout data Wednesday, pegging the overall rate at 24.2 percent and saying it would end reliance "on complicated formulas to make educated guesses about how many students were graduating and how many were leaving school without diplomas."

O'Connell clearly hopes the new report, which he says is based on hard-number tracking of students, will quiet heated debate in political and academic circles over the true dimensions of California's dropout problem – but that doesn't seem likely.

The 24.2 percent figure is anywhere from five to nine points lower than calculations done by researchers at Harvard University, the University of California and private groups. It was released just a few weeks after O'Connell's department calculated a high school attrition rate of 33 percent – subtracting last year's high school graduates from the number of ninth- graders four years earlier.

The new calculations, O'Connell and his aides say, are based on tracking individual students through new "statewide student identifier" numbers and account for 8.2 percent who left the state or are categorized as continuing their schooling without graduating.

"Now," he said, "using student-level data, we can improve the accuracy of our count of how many students drop out, increase accountability and focus on preventing dropouts."

But Alan Bonsteel, president of California Parents for Educational Choice, is unconvinced, saying the new system is still subject to school officials' manipulation. "In the scientific world, self-reported and unverified data is never accepted," he said. "We've seen this kind of system in the past in California, and the school districts simply pretended not to see when the kids disappeared."

Criticism from Bonsteel and other education outsiders about the low dropout numbers routinely issued by the Department of Education, and varying data from academic studies led to the new system.

A Harvard University study a few years ago, for instance, placed the state's dropout rate at 29 percent, and Gary Orefield, director of the project, said, "Large urban school districts in California have become dropout factories. The economic and social impacts of this dropout crisis are too enormous for California to ignore. The state must make schools accountable for graduating their students and provide resources to help students whose careers would be

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wrecked by leaving school."

The largest of the state's districts, Los Angeles Unified, which handles more than 10 percent of the state's K-12 students and has an especially diverse student mix, has been sharply criticized for its high dropout rate. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa cited it in seeking a role in the district's administration.

The California Dropout Research Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, pegged LAUSD's dropout rate at 52 percent while the latest state figures indicate that as many as 60 percent of ninth-graders didn't make it to graduation. Just last week, a study sponsored by LAUSD and five other large school districts in a coalition called the Partnership for Urban Education Research and conducted by Policy Analysis for Public Education at the University of California, Berkeley, tagged the Los Angeles dropout rate at 25.74 percent, using methodology somewhat similar to that employed in the new state report. But the state's report says LAUSD has a 33.6 percent dropout rate.

If anything, therefore, O'Connell's new numbers (which don't count students who drop out before entering the ninth grade, by the way) join a very eclectic mix of data and may add more confusion rather than more clarity to the single most important aspect of the state's troubled education system.

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