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The Sacramento Bee, Calif., Dan Walters column: Still more evidence official high school dropout rate is sham(Sacramento Bee, The (CA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jun. 25--Cruising through the state Department of Education Web site in search of high school graduation and dropout rates, one finally reaches a page that purports to provide them -- and the situation doesn't sound too bad. As the department tells it, relying on data provided by local school districts and applying a calculation method used by most states, less than 13 percent of California's high-schoolers don't graduate. The problem with the number, however, is that it is dead wrong, understating California's dropout rate by at least 100 percent. How do we know? Because a massive new nationwide study of high school graduation, published by the authoritative professional journal Education Week, estimates that 29 percent of California youngsters don't make it through high school. And California's official dropout rate is further out of synch with reality than those of most other states. The new study's findings are virtually identical to those of two other national surveys, as well as those conducted by independent researchers inside California. The new study, entitled "Diplomas Count," should be, therefore, the final nail in the coffin of the self-serving guesswork that educators in California and elsewhere have foisted on the public and used to claim success under the federal No Child Left Behind program. Simply put, California is a major and willing participant in a political fraud -- the sort of phony accounting that put corporate executives behind bars. "Most states don't do graduation-rate accountability," Daniel Losen, a senior education law and policy associate at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, told Education Week. He said they set low goals for themselves to demonstrate improvement under the act "and timelines that could literally take hundreds of years to meet those goals. It's basically a total sham." California is implementing a new system to track its public school students by assigning identification numbers. But in the meantime, while it and others states jump through mathematical hoops to come up with their rosy graduation rates, independent researchers take the common-sense approach: comparing how many kids start the ninth grade to how many receive diplomas. The full process is a little more complicated than that, but the nine-to-12 comparison lies at its heart. The "Diplomas Count" study tells us that nationally, just 69.6 percent of high-schoolers are making it through successfully, ranging from 52.5 percent in South Carolina to 84.5 percent in New Jersey. California, at 71 percent, is slightly above the U.S. average and also mirrors other national trends: higher dropout rates among boys than among girls, higher dropout rates in urban school districts and distressingly high dropout rates among African American and Latino youngsters. Dropout reports for the state's biggest school districts are almost entirely negative. The largest district (and second largest in the nation), Los Angeles Unified, has a 44.23 percent dropout rate, sixth worst among the nation's 50 largest districts. Education Week published its findings, coincidentally, as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was in the Capitol, strenuously lobbying for legislation that would give him and other mayors direct responsibility for Los Angeles Unified's operation. And he quickly seized on the new study to drive home his point that LAUSD needs more accountability. "We cannot allow the status quo to continue," Villaraigosa said, pointing to the dropout numbers. "It's unacceptable." The new dropout data may have played a role in the breakthrough that Villaraigosa achieved later in the week -- a compromise that would give him and the other mayors the key role in selecting a new superintendent for the district who, in turn, would have more autonomy from the school board, whose role would be reduced. Villaraigosa's crusade notwithstanding, rearranging the leadership of L.A. Unified or any other district, unto itself, is just one small step. A whole new approach to high school is needed. Kids come into high school with immense disparities of motivation, intelligence and talent and need individualized programs of study ranging from remedial through vocational to college preparatory. The one-size-fits-all attitude too many districts adopt is bound to fail. |