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Dealing with dropouts
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April 2008
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Bill Betzen teaches in a Dallas middle school. He also spent 28 years in social work around the city, working child abuse cases for 17 of those years. He saw the critical work Dallas ISD was doing for those kids, but there’s one area he thinks the district needs to step up its game: Dealing with drop outs. Click the jump to see how big the problem is, and to read about a small project Bill launched to combat it. By Bill Betzen The Dallas ISD class of 2006 had 15,314 students back in 2002-03. when those kids were ninth-graders. During the next 4 years Dallas ISD reported 11percent of the class, or 1,693 students, as having dropped out. Then in 2006 diplomas were given to 6,343 students, about 41.4 percent of the original class. That leaves 7,278 students (47.5 percent of the original class) in something other than a “graduate” or “dropout” category. When there are more students in the “other than graduate or dropout” categories than in the category of graduate, we have failed in much more that just allowing a sadly high dropout rate. We have failed to both keep track of our students, and to admit what is really happening to them. A reliable way to see the history of student progress toward graduation is not available on the Dallas ISD web site. I've compiled data that provides a much clearer picture of our annual student movement from year to year. This spreadsheet shows that the average ninth grade cohort graduation rate for the years 2000 through 2006 for Dallas ISD was only 44 percent. What is happening to the other 56 percent of students? A recent John Hopkins University study identified 1,700 “dropout factories” among the 17,000 public U.S. high schools. A school was placed on the list when the ninth grade cohort promotion rate, the percentage of ninth graders making it to the 12th grade with their class, averaged 60 percent, or less, for the classes of 2004, 2005 and 2006 . All 21 non-magnet high schools in Dallas ISD made this list! The average Dallas ISD ninth grade cohort promotion rate for these three years was only 45 percent. This rate was evenly distributed throughout the city. Dallas has a problem that is not getting the attention is deserves. How do we keep our children in school? In a recent Dallas Morning News editorial, one appropriately supporting Dr. Hinojosa’s academy ideas, the core solution was given when it said: “This academy structure sounds as if it will help teens tangibly connect the dots between school and future employment, a big deterrent to dropping out.” Connecting our students to their own futures is required to lower dropout rates. Three years ago, one Dallas middle school started a project to help students make such future connections. A 350-pound vault was bolted to the floor, under spotlights, in a place of respect in the school lobby. This vault works as a time-capsule and is called the School Archive. All students know the Archive holds student letters going back to 2005. All students also know they will write letters to themselves for the Archive before leaving for high school. They know the letter is to be about their lives and plans for the future. They know they will then pose holding this finished letter for a photo with their class in front of the School Archive the last week of eighth grade. They then will place their letter onto the shelf for their class inside the vault where it stays for the next decade. A copy of the class photo taken in front of the School Archive is given to each student as a reminder of their letter waiting in the Archive. Information about their 10-year class reunion is on the back of the photo. Students know that at their reunion they will be invited to speak with the then current 8th grade class about their recommendations for success. They prepare for questions from decade younger students like: "Would you do anything differently if you were 13 again?" Thinking of answering such a question in 10 years helps students realize the value of current school work. They must build their own futures. Nobody is going to do it for them. The first students to write letters for the School Archive are now high school juniors. The two high schools most of these students attend, Pinkston and Sunset, now have 50 more juniors than last year. It appears more of our students are now staying in school. The Archive Project cost taxpayers almost nothing! More Dallas middle schools need a vault in their lobby. |
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Comments
Posted by park @ 11:28 AM Mon, Jan 28, 2008
Thanks so much for your hard work. Here are suggestions: quit rewarding principals and administrators for lying about the dropout rate. Principals know all the tricks for hiding their real dropout rates, and teachers know all the subtle tricks of making students disappear.
Second, use the research from idra.org. They have best practices and research on the myths regarding dropouts.
Third, elect board members whose first concern is building community and accountability to citizens. Fourth, refuse ridiculous salaries, perks, and extended contracts for central administrators. This attracts sharks, not seasoned teaching veterans who know how to build community through practicing inclusion.
Stop the CEO analogies for the superintendent's position. Building community is the first step in keeping children in school until graduation, and being an advocate for children requires completely different priorities than the self-aggrandizement of the CEO role.
Posted by Kent Fischer @ 11:34 AM Mon, Jan 28, 2008
For what it's worth, DMN education writer Holly Hacker points out that TEA recently implemented a tougher standard for calculating dropouts. Under the new formula, DISD’s rate went from 7.9 pct in 2005 to 19.4 pct in 2006. Here's what TEA says about it:
"Beginning with dropouts reported for the 2005-06 school year, TEA used a more rigorous dropout definition, based on the federal definition. For this reason, in 2007 a school leaver provision was in place, stating that a campus or district rating cannot be lowered because of performance on annual dropout rate. Further, because dropout rates for 2005-06 are not comparable to those reported for 2004-05, they are shown for 2005-06 only."
This comes from the most-recent state accountability reports.
Posted by park @ 12:13 PM Mon, Jan 28, 2008
If the "continued high school" category were accurate, there would certainly be more children graduating.
To back it up a bit, the first step in dropping out is truancy. If the attendance rates reported to the state were accurate, then the dropout rates couldn't be so high. The disconnect in current reporting is between the attendance rates, frequently reported at 90% or above, and the actual dropout rates. At what point in the school year do most kids disappear?
Posted by Martha Parks @ 12:35 PM Mon, Jan 28, 2008
I know of high school students that drop out because they DO have a job. As far as they're concerned, they ARE connected to a career and have no need for school. Keeping these kids in school requires a commitment from local businesses to only hire student age employees if they can prove, on a regular basis, they are in school and passing. We have No Pass/No Play. How about No Pass/ No Work ? It won't keep them out of their father's business, but it will keep them out of Gamestop and others like it.
Posted by Perry Heritage @ 3:30 PM Mon, Jan 28, 2008
One point easily missed in the table of graduation rates presented by Bill Betzen is that Texas is only one of five states in the nation that has not adopted the Graduation Cohort Method for calculating graduation rates. It is easy to see why Texas and DISD don't use this accepted method; DISD, for example, reports over 80% graduation rates instead of less than 45% based on the method used by almost every other state. For DISD sometimes the truth is just too hard to accept.
Posted by Bill Betzen @ 4:23 PM Mon, Jan 28, 2008
Perry, I am very interested in your comment about Cohort graduation rates and Texas. According to a recent edweek article at http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/dc/2007/40policy-2.pdf Texas is using what they call a "Cohort Graduation Rate." Whatever rate they are using, it is not giving results that verify what a simple spreadsheet shows, such as the one at http://www.studentmotivation.org/DallasISD.htm. Until school districts can place online relatively simple spreadsheets like this, that are updated every year, and that refect numbers consistent with whatever dropout rates they claim, we are making no progress. It appears we have been making the securing of dropout rates a very complex and costly process for less than ethical reasons. Simple spreadsheets would have exposed the crisis years ago and in the process would have saved millions of dollars used to hide the dropout crisis. Maybe a few thousand more students would have graduated if the dropout process had been better exposed by such multi-year enrollment-by-grade spreadsheets. Misleading people about the volumn of students disappearing from our educational system ultimately only helps folks whose income increases when crime increases.
Posted by Diane Birdwell @ 8:16 AM Tue, Jan 29, 2008
Let's stop for a second and ask ourselves, "Would our parents have let us fail 9th grade English I THREE times?"
Or, "Would my mother be proud to tell her friends that I was a 17 yr old freshman?"
You can play with stats all you want, but it comes down to the PARENTS! Remember them? A kid will drop out if his parents LET him.
Why not interview the parents of about 100 dropouts? Ask them what THEY did to keep their kids in school. Go cover the truancy courts. They just tell the parents to get them to school, NOT to pass the classes, in order to get off the court's docket. Judges must think kids learn through rear end osmosis, as long as their butt is in class, they learn. No, that is not what happens. Now, I have a resentful kid, one who HAS to be in class--but he will show that judge! He just won't do anything! --Oh, and therefore, he is on my CEI....
Too often, society has problems that somehow become the sole domain of the schools. We need to hold the parents accountable.
Posted by Bill Betzen @ 4:22 PM Tue, Jan 29, 2008
Diane, I understand your frustration with parents. But often parents never went beyond 6th grade themselves and they are fighting with 2 minimum wage jobs to keep food on the table. They rarely see their children due to their work, and are living in a culture that is strange to them anyhow. We simply must do as a culture, as a school, what we can to help the children from families of poverty, especially immigrant children. That is why we must encourage the parents to encourage their children, our students, to think seriously of their own futures. Parents seem to like the idea of inviting their children to return 10 years after middle school to tell the students a decade behind them what they would do differently if they themselves were 13 again.
Parents like the idea of having help to focus their children onto the future. That is what parents struggle to do themselves. They welcome help.
Every day I see students, 95% of whom I am certain can graduate high school. Statistics tell me less than 44% make it with their class! We cannot blame it all on their parents. Dallas ISD can always do a better job! We simply need to congratulate ourselves for the successes we have had, and then push harder.
Posted by park @ 4:55 PM Tue, Jan 29, 2008
An education professor once made the comment that great teaching is like a cattle drive. You push all of them as far as possible and lose as few as possible.
Motivating, prodding, and pushing are part of the job of all teachers. Inviting the parents to work as part of a team tends to work miracles, and parents have antennas as to whether that invitation is sincere. If the invitation sounds about as sincere as Hinojosa's invitation for parental involvement, we all know there will be a lack of involvement.
Posted by Diane Birdwell @ 5:35 PM Tue, Jan 29, 2008
Bill--
I appreciate what the parents go through, but you know, my grandfather had only a 6th grade education, and his wife was a German immigrant with the equivalent of a 10th grade education. They worked hard, too. They went through the Great Depression--and precisely because of what they endured, my mom graduated from high school. I graduated from college.
Their work does not have to mean they cannot parent. That is an excuse we hear too often. I have former students whose parents are exactly as you describe--and they are attending Texas A&M, TWU and other schools on scholarship.
You tell the parents that having children was THEIR choice. THEY must take responsibility. THEY must impart on their kids the idea that working two minimum wage jobs is NOT the way to live, so GO GET AN EDUCATION--oh, say, just like so many of my Vietnamese and Cambodian kids hear from their parents. They seem to do just fine in getting the message across.
High standards does not mean I have no empathy, but I feel worse when I see them succumb to the victimology.
One other thing, I haven't had a chance to read this particular study, but is it really realistic to expect a kid who moves back to Mexico--or to Houston--or wherever, to tell us where they went? I have students who literally just walk away from school, not even withdrawing. They just move. No word. Nothing.
Posted by Rick @ 9:55 PM Wed, Jan 30, 2008
Couple of comments:
On a school's AEIS report, "Completion Rate I" is a cohort-based rating (and part of accountability) that tracks all students over a 5-year period. Interestingly enough, if a student doesn't graduate, but enrolls and attends for just one day before the last Friday in September of their 5th year, they are considered a "continuer" and don't count against Completion Rate I. If they then dropout, they hit the dropout rate, but that doesn't affect accountability; it is only reported. There is a loophole there that needs to be examined carefully by the state (not TEA but legislative folks that make the rules). Watch next September and see how many folks have "dropout recovery drives" to "get those kids back in school."
TEA considers a true cohort picture (how many kids did you have enroll as freshmen, then how many graduated four years later) as an "attrition rate." I don't think it's measured anywhere.
This issue is so complex for schools, and everyone- from the state to each campus- is trying to find the spin. The system is too massive and too bureaucratically entrenched to make the required changes as fast as necessary.
Posted by Rick @ 9:59 PM Wed, Jan 30, 2008
One other comment- Grand Prairie ISD is holding a "dropout recovery fair" this Saturday at the GPISD Board Room from 10-2. Not just public school (GPISD), but private schools, community colleges, trade schools, the military, and industry folks will be present to talk to any adult who hasn't finished high school to explain their options. Eighteen-year olds with 2 HS credits need a way out- private school or GED is certainly a better option (even though they can go to school through 26, let's all get real here...)
For more info on the GPISD fair, go to
http://www.gpisd.org/frontpage/news.html
Posted by Bill Betzen @ 4:00 PM Thu, Feb 07, 2008
Regarding Park's analogy with the cattle drive above: "An education professor once made the comment that great teaching is like a cattle drive. You push all of them as far as possible and lose as few as possible."
I grew up on my Dad's farm in Hereford herding & working cattle. My brothers still live there working their farms and feedyards, fattening and selling several thousand cattle a year. If any of them lost even close to 10% of their cattle in the process they would not be cattlemen for very long. Dallas schools are losing close to 50%!
To compare Dallas schools to a cattle drive is to compare them to a terribly destructive and wasteful cattle drive, one that no real cowboy would have anything to do with!
Why is there not more concern for all the children we are losing before graduation? Why is this issue not getting more attention in Dallas?