Riverside Press-Enterprise Editorial

Dropout madness

10:00 PM PDT on Thursday, November 1, 2007

California high schools do not have to be "dropout factories" where students are as likely to leave as to graduate. Bolstering such schools requires more student information, better educational resources and earlier intervention by educators -- and a commitment to improvement by politicians and the public alike.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University say that in about 12 percent of the nation's high schools -- nearly 1,700 schools -- no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. Of California's 886 high schools, 107 match that description, including 11 Inland high schools. The researchers analyzed Education Department data for the Associated Press.

A good education, though, is crucial to success in life, and California pays a high social cost for thousands of students leaving school without basic skills. No state should tolerate a system that leaves a significant share of children ill-suited to thrive in -- and contribute to -- the communities they live in. The Johns Hopkins researchers offer a useful guide to communities for boosting schools (see web.jhu.edu/csos), but California can begin improvements with some basic steps.

California cannot rescue struggling high schools without better information about what happens on campus. Until the state knows which students drop out and where they hit trouble, California cannot craft a coherent strategy to curb the dropout rate.

So the state needs to get its student-tracking system running as soon as possible. California tests students every year, but does not follow the progress of individual students. Yet without tracking individual
performance, the state does not even have an accurate count of how many students quit high school.

Despite this deficiency, this year's state budget deleted $65 million to
help school districts prepare for the tracking system's planned 2009 launch.

The Legislature also should ensure that struggling high schools have
sufficient resources to reverse dropout trends. California's poorest-performing schools tend to have the least-qualified teachers. And those schools frequently cannot offer the programs and other extra help needed to keep at-risk students in class.

Changing that dynamic requires putting salary and other incentives in place to attract the best teachers to the neediest schools, and ensuring that troubled schools have the money and personnel for programs that help retain students.

And California cannot wait until students enter high school to address poor achievement. Students who falter in lower grades are far more likely to quit high school. Schools need to identify vulnerable kids in elementary and middle schools, and target programs to help them succeed.

Again, the tracking system is key: Data on individual performance would provide an organized, rational method for pinpointing students in need of early intervention.

Such steps are far from comprehensive, but they would make a good start on curtailing the state's dropout rates. And Californians should not abide a school system that manufactures dropouts almost as often as graduates.