Dropout miscount

WHEN THE Civil Rights Project at Harvard University released a study in March concluding that the graduation rate for “minority” students in the Los Angeles Unified School District was under 50%, nobody publicly second-guessed them. On the contrary, politicians and editorialists embraced the figure as gospel.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa evidently believes the number and routinely cites it when arguing for education reform. And why wouldn’t he? The district’s student body is 71% Latino, and for nearly a generation activists have claimed that half of Latino students drop out of school.

There is only one problem with this mantra, however. The figure is bogus.

It’s not that the authors of the Harvard study lied. It’s just that the methodology they used wasn’t appropriate to measure high school completion in a city such as Los Angeles.

There are a number of problems, but the chief one is there for everyone to see on Page 8 of the study’s executive summary. It states that “48% of the minority students enrolled in 9th grade in the fall of 1998 successfully completed high school in the district four years later.”

In other words, the study only took into account those students who completed high school within L.A. Unified. Students who, say, transferred outside the district or to private schools were not included.

There are many ways to measure high school dropout and graduation rates, and none of them are perfect. But a method that ignores the remarkably high transience of L.A.’s population -- particularly among its immigrants -- seems particularly problematic.

“If you don’t take into account that everyone is moving all the time,” said USC urban demographer Dowell Myers, “then you’re going to overestimate the number of dropouts. Los Angeles is a city of transplants.”

For both its foreign-born and native-born populations, the city increasingly serves as a waystation. While migrants may locate here soon after arrival, within a decade, significant numbers depart for the surrounding suburbs. Furthermore, skyrocketing housing prices have pushed Angelenos to change residences more rapidly than ever before.

For these and a host of other reasons, Lawrence Michel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, says that the Harvard figure is “inaccurate and doesn’t make sense.”

Although no one would argue that dropout rates in L.A. Unified are acceptable -- the California Department of Education, using a different methodology, reports a 33.1% overall and a 34.4% Latino dropout rate for the district in the 2003-2004 school year -- Michel and others fear the political consequences of exaggerating social problems.

Although it is not unusual for politicians and activist scholars to inflate the gravity of social ills to draw attention to them, these tactics can sometimes be counterproductive. By exaggerating the failures of struggling urban schools, sympathetic critics risk further undermining public support for them. Neither voters nor taxpayers enjoy supporting hopeless causes.

A 2003 Pew Hispanic Center study sought to bring the discussion down to earth, concluding that although the national Latino dropout rate is still “alarmingly high,” it is “considerably lower” than many commonly cited calculations and therefore a “more manageable challenge.”

According to Pew, the Latino dropout rate in California dropped to 17.8% in 2000 from 25.4% in 1990.

The study also pointed to the need to distinguish between U.S.-born Latinos and foreign-born Latino youth who have had little or no contact with U.S. schools and yet are often counted as dropouts.

In his book, “Rules for Radicals,” Saul Alinsky, generally considered the father of community organizing, urged activists to “rub raw the resentments of the people” and elicit disappointment and dissatisfaction.

But Alinsky also knew that for concerned citizens to muster the courage to tackle problems, they must also have the confidence that they can succeed in the end.

Dropout rates in L.A. Unified are far from acceptable. But the constant depiction of L.A. schools and Latino educational achievement as hopeless is a strategy that helps no one.