The Economic Benefits of Reducing the Dropout Rate Among Students of Color in the Nation’s Largest Metropolitan Areas

Eliminating half of Louisville's 1050 dropouts

from the Class of 2008

Would have increased earnings $5.6 million

Spending & Investment $5.4 million

Home & Auto sales $11 million

This from the Alliance for Excellent Education:

Years of data have consistently underscored the persistent graduation gap between America’s students of color and their peers. The most recent estimate shows that high school graduation rates for African American, Latino, and American Indian students hover only slightly higher than 50 percent. This is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their white peers.

In addition to the moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, there is also a strong economic argument for helping more students of color graduate from high school. Lowering the dropout rate brings a range of benefits to a community, many of which most people do not realize. Graduating more students from high school can have a profound impact on increased earnings potential, home and auto sales, and other important economic indicators for communities and states.

Earlier in 2010, the Alliance for Excellent Education documented the benefits of reducing the dropout rate for all students in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Building on this work, the Alliance is now able to estimate the economic benefits of reducing the dropout rate among students of color in these metro areas. These findings were developed in partnership with Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based economic firm specializing in socioeconomic impact tools, and with the generous support of State Farm®.

To see how cutting the dropout rate in half in students of color subgroups in the nation’s fifty largest cities—and the metropolitan areas that surround them—would benefit the nation’s economy as a whole, read the aggregate analysis.

Check out the data for Louisville here.

Hat tip to the Commish

Commish Talks Graduation Rate

This from Terry Holliday at Doc H's Blog:

While Numbers Are Important, Children Matter Most

...While I was impressed with the Kentucky graduation rate of more than 83 percent, I did learn that Kentucky had not yet reported the NCLB four-year graduation rate due to technical issues. We are scheduled to report this data with this year’s entering freshman class when that group graduates in 2013.

Upon digging into the data, I learned that Kentucky had more than 6,500 students drop out of school in the 2007-08 school year. These numbers reflect real children and reflect a real concern for the economic, social, moral and civil rights impact that high school dropouts will have on our Commonwealth...we cannot accept 6,500 students dropping out of school...

There are some that will focus on the numbers and debate the accuracy of those numbers. We do need to ensure we are reporting accurately; however, we need to focus on the children and what we as adults can do to help more children graduate from high school and be prepared for postsecondary work.

The biggest challenge to overcome is the excuse that some children cannot learn due to their economic and social conditions.

Dropouts cost cities millions

This from the San Diego Union Tribune:

Dropping out of school might seem like the easy way out for teenagers who feel buried by bad grades and personal problems.

But ditching out on school without a diploma passes along a multibillion-dollar burden to taxpayers, according to a report last week.

The California Dropout Research Project estimates that the teenagers who drop out of school in San Diego during an average year cost city taxpayers a total of more than $534 million over their lifetimes...

Reducing Dropout Rates

So tonight I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be a community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself; it's quitting on your country. And this country needs and values the talents of every American.

--President Barack Obama

This from Ed Week:

“Grad Nation: A Guidebook to

Help Communities Tackle the Dropout Crisis”

One of the first steps for anyone wanting to reduce the dropout rate in a community may be to convince others that a dropout problem exists, according to a guide released this month.

The publication, “Grad Nation," lists some statistics that may help demonstrate the seriousness of the problem. It notes, for example, that nearly a third of public high school students don’t graduate with their class, and that in 2,000 high schools, 40 percent of freshmen typically drop out by their senior year...

More Accurate Reporting Won't Solve Dropout Problem

This from Ed Week, Cartoon by John Trever in the Albuquerque Journal:

America is now the only country in the industrialized world where young people are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were, according to a new study by the nonpartisan Education Trust. Two numbers illustrate this serious
challenge.

25 percent: That is the alarmingly large number of American high school students who quit before earning their diplomas.

50 percent: That is the extraordinary number of minority students in United States who do not finish high school on schedule. Even schools with otherwise commendable overall graduation rates can camouflage the poor graduation rates of minority or special-needs students...

Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate, Class of 2006

Overall - 73%

African American - 59%

Asian -90%

Latino - 61%

NativeAmerican - 62%

White - 81%

...As “The Silent Epidemic,” a report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, showed, while there is no single cause for students’ dropping out, boredom and disengagement and the coursework’s perceived lack of relevance to their futures are major contributing factors...

A Plan to Cut the High School Dropout Rate

This from the New York Times:

High school graduation rates are universally seen as a barometer of success, or failure, in education. Parents, college admissions officers, even savvy real estate agents rely on that particular statistic to tell them if a school is any good.

But just as it takes a village to raise a child, graduation rates in New Jersey and elsewhere have also become a measure of the larger community outside the school and whether its politicians, civic leaders, business executives and even police officers are all doing their job as well.

Last week, Gov. Jon S. Corzine and state officials announced a yearlong, multiagency initiative to boost the state’s graduation rates. Called the New Jersey High School Graduation Campaign, it will be led not by the state’s Department of Education but by the state attorney general’s office, with funds from businesses like Verizon and Prudential, among others.

The idea is to keep young people in school not just for their own good, but also as a pre-emptive strike against violence and gang activity...

Kentucky public schools increase graduation rates

Secretary Spellings has vowed to nationalize the definitions related to dropout/graduation rates. This is a good thing. In fact, it's the approach NCLB should have taken form the start - national goals and definitions, but state level efforts to reach those goals.

Be that as it may, using the current nationally recognized, if flawed, definitions, new state data shows slightly more of Kentucky's public school pupils are graduating high school and fewer are dropping out.

The Kentucky Department of Education released data on Wednesday that shows Kentucky's graduation rate has increased from 83.26 in 2006 to 83.72 percent last year. The data shows the percentage of high school dropouts fell from 3.3 percent in 2006 to 3.2 percent in 2007.

While the current definition may not be perfect, it is consistently used in Kentucky and is valid for verifying the positive change.

SOURCE: KDE press release

Stemming the Tide of High School Dropouts

High School Dropout Prevention

Twenty five years since the release of the landmark “A Nation at Risk” report, the state of our education and our young people remain very much at risk. The result, as revealed in new analysis, is that our nation is facing a dropout crisis with our largest cities paying the biggest price.

Every 26 seconds, one American high school student drops out of school. That adds up to more than 1.1 million students per year. For those young people who don’t graduate from high school, their future prospects are dim.

A new report released by America's Promise Alliance finds that America's largest cities are struggling to keep studends in school.

Read the report

The Call to Action: Dropout Prevention Summits

In the next five years, the Alliance wants to reverse this trend and, with the help of our partners, deliver more Promises to 15 million of our nation's most disadvantaged young people.

Our top priority: improved high school completion rates. It's the most important indicator that a young person is on the road to success....

States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School

I don't know what the current data is...but a few years back when I served on the Fayette County School Equity Council, we saw data that showed half of the entering freshmen at a local high school never graduated. In 2007 that high school reported a graduation rate of 72%. This is either tremendous progress...or a big honkin' statistical lie. My money's on the latter.

This is a topic Dick Innes pounds on over at the Bluegrass Institute. While we may disagree about what should be done about it - we can agree that accounting for Kentucky's graduates and dropouts ought to be accurate.

Without a standard definition of dropout/graduation rate and accurate accounting we will always have stuff like this ...from the New York Times:

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later...

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals...

Walton-Verona's dropout rate: 0%

There's something seriously missing from the Walton-Verona School District that you hear about at most high schools in Northern Kentucky and across the U.S.

Dropouts.

Since 1999, according to the district, there hasn't been a single one on the Walton-Verona High campus in Walton, thanks largely to an ambitious program targeting at-risk students that involves far more than just drop-out prevention.

Today, the Kentucky School Boards Association will present to the district its PEAK Award at a 2 p.m. event at the high school's library.

The award, short for Public Education Achieves in Kentucky, is given only to two public school districts each school year with programs that, according to the association Web site, "enhance student learning skills and, in doing so, promote the positive impact of public elementary and secondary education" in the commonwealth.

The district's exemplary record at keeping students in class is due in large part to the Schools and Families Empowered Agent program. In its eighth year at Walton-Verona, it was prompted, in part, by the district's ineligibility for state-funded family resource or youth-service centers.

It doesn't have enough financially disadvantaged students receiving free or reduced-price lunch to qualify for such centers, but that didn't mean there wasn't a need for them.

At Walton-Verona, the SAFE point person is Larry Davis, who tirelessly monitors student achievement and attendance from pre-school through the high school to identify at-risk kids.

He has an elaborate system to address those needs.

Davis made 100 visits to students' homes last school year, regularly monitored 52 students, served as a mediator in 19 truancy cases and referred 32 students to medical professionals ranging from physicians to counselors.

He typically keeps track of about 110 students considered at-risk each year...

This from the Kentucky Post.

1 in 10 schools are 'dropout factories'

The High Cost of High School Dropouts
What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools

WASHINGTON — It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60% of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year.

That dubious distinction applies to more than one in 10 high schools across America.

"If you're born in a neighborhood or town where the only high school is one where graduation is not the norm, how is this living in the land of equal opportunity?" asks Bob Balfanz, the researcher at Johns Hopkins University who defines such a school as a "dropout factory."

There are about 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide that fit that description, according to an analysis of Education Department data conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press. That's 12% of all such schools, no more than a decade ago but no less, either.

While some of the missing students transferred, most dropped out, Balfanz says. The data tracked senior classes for three years in a row — 2004, 2005 and 2006 — to make sure local events like plant closures weren't to blame for the low retention rates.

The highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest. Most have high proportions of minority students. These schools are tougher to turn around, because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones — the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services....

This from USA Today. Interactive Map with Kentucky data.

The following Kentucky High Schools fit the "dropout factory" criteria: Clay County; Dayton; Bryan Station; Betsy Layne; South Floyd; Franklin County; Gallatin County; Grant County; North Hardin County; Evarts HS; Jackson County; Doss; Fairdale; Fern Creek; Iroquois; Jeffersontown & Moore Traditional.

The Regrets of a School Dropout

Half of Black Males Fail to Graduate With Their Class

...Statistics show that more than 50 percent of black male students fail to graduate with their class each year. In some urban jurisdictions such as New York and Chicago, upwards of two-thirds of them leave high school before graduation, according to a study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

In Maryland, 46 percent of black male teenagers dropped out during the 2003-04 school year, compared with 22 percent of white males. In Virginia, 47 percent dropped out, compared with 27 percent of white male students, and in the District, the dropout rate for black males was 51 percent, compared with 5 percent of white males, the report said.

Experts said the implications are stark: Dropouts struggle to find good jobs; they become teen fathers, get arrested and abuse drugs and alcohol at a much higher rate than that of their counterparts who graduate from high school.

Alvin Thornton, a Howard University administrator and author of the study that led Maryland to pump more than a billion additional dollars into its schools, blames a number of factors, among them the lack of early learning opportunities, absent parenting and a shortage of programs to engage these students in school.

"I think if we ever had any other community that found its male children suffering as they are in our community -- they would institute programs and demand that others, like government, help to address the problem," Thornton said.

Many dropouts, he said, experience problems as early as the elementary years. "It's called the fourth-grade syndrome, and it's the time when schools move away from them and they become lost and alienated."

This from the Washington Post.

Fayette County sees good news in new dropout data

The rates of students dropping out of high school are at a three-year low in the Fayette County Public Schools. And national tests designed to predict student success in high school and college show that Fayette County Public School students are outperforming the national and state averages.

“Based on these results, if we were looking into a crystal ball I would say the work that we’ve been doing is beginning to pay off and we’re seeing progress,” said Fayette County Schools Superintendent Stu Silberman.”

The release of data, which is the first round of results from the Commonwealth Accountability and Testing System to be made public by the Kentucky Department of Education, included the results of two tests taken for the first time last fall by students in Kentucky. Also included are the non-academic indicators of success used to determine how schools are doing, such as attendance rates, retention rates and high school drop out rates.

The data was good news all around for Fayette County Public Schools. Among the highlights:
High school drop out rates for the district fell to 3.74 percent – a three year best for Fayette County. (Changes in the calculations of dropout rates make comparisons further back than three years invalid.)

Dropout rates improved at all but one high school.

Dropout rates posted by four of five area high schools are at a three year best.

Eighth-graders taking a national high school readiness test for the first time posted scores significantly above the national average in English, reading, science and the overall score. Scores were .1 below the national average in math.

High school sophomores taking a national college readiness test for the first time posted scores significantly above the national average in math, reading, science and the overall score. Scores were .1 below the national average in English.

Seven area middle schools posted scores above the national average.

Four area high schools posted scores above the national average.

This from FCPS.

And this from the Courier-Journal.

Overall, the state high school dropout rate last year was 3.3 percent -- representing 6,329 students. The year before, 3.5 percent dropped out and 3.4 percent dropped out during the 2003-2004 school year.