Dropout Rate Cut to 18.2% Statewide : Education: Percentage of students leaving high school falls below 20% for first time since 1986. Aggressive school reforms credited.

For the first time since the state Department of Education began keeping data on the number of students leaving high school without graduating, California’s dropout rate has fallen below 20%, according to a report released Thursday.

In the class of 1991, 18.2% of students dropped out of high school, compared to 20.1% of the previous year’s senior class and 25% of the class of 1986, the first year the figures were collected.

An elated Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, credited local school officials for making steady improvements despite recent years of exploding enrollments and shrinking state funding.

“This takes a lot of dedicated and enthusiastic teachers, administrators and parents. People have been working hard on this, and it’s continuing to pay off,” Honig said in an interview, noting that there has been steady progress toward keeping youngsters in school since the state launched a series of education reforms in the mid-1980s.

“That is not to say that 18% is satisfactory--it is not. But what is important is that we are improving,” Honig said. The department wants the dropout rate below 10% by the turn of the century.

Rates for counties and districts varied widely. In Los Angeles County, the average rate was 26.2%, an improvement over the 31.4% posted for the class of 1986 but higher than the state average.

By contrast, Orange County’s dropout rate, 15.5%, was below the state average and also down from the 19.9% tallied five years earlier. Riverside County improved its dropout rate from 27% in 1986 to 16.8% in 1991, dipping below the state average for the first time. San Bernardino County’s 19.3% was an improvement from 1986’s 31.1%.

For San Diego County, the rate dropped from 24.9% in 1986 to 11.4% for 1991. And in Ventura County, which has always enjoyed a lower-than-average dropout rate, the proportion of students not finishing high school slid from 17.1% to 10.7%.

Within Los Angeles County, rates varied markedly among individual districts. In the financially strapped, 640,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, progress has been steady but slow, and the district’s dropout rate remains far above the state average. In the class of ‘91, 38.1% failed to graduate, representing a 10.8% improvement over the 42.7% for the class of ’86.

Some other districts with large, poor populations also continued to struggle. Lynwood Unified had a dropout rate of 37.6%, which represented a 9% improvement over the 41.3% of 1986. But the picture worsened for Compton Unified, which had the highest dropout rate of the 16 county districts that showed a five-year increase. The Compton rate grew to 37.3%, a 35.1% increase over 27.6% in 1986.

By contrast, many districts in relatively affluent suburbs continued to do well. Nine such districts in the county had rates below 5%--including San Marino, which had no dropouts.

Efforts to keep students in school paid off in gains for all of California’s biggest ethnic groups. The dropout rate for Asian-Americans declined from 16.3% in 1986 to 10.3%; for African-Americans it dropped from 35.7% to 29.4%, and for Latinos it dipped from 35.1% to 27.2%. The dropout rate for white students slid from 20.2% to 12%.

Most districts that made major strides did so with special programs targeting youths with chronic attendance or academic problems. The predominantly minority Montebello Unified School District brought its rate from 25.1% to 8.9%--a plunge of almost 65% in five years.

The 33,000-student Montebello district several years ago began a series of education reforms, among them several programs aimed at students considered likely to drop out. The efforts included counselors to help struggling students make the transition from middle school to high school, attendance counselors to work with families of frequently absent or misbehaving students, and special classes for students with attendance or behavior problems.

But most of these programs were scaled back or eliminated last week after a series of budget cuts.

Honig said he is concerned that continuing budget problems for the state, which provides most of local districts’ funding and faces potential deficits of up to $6 billion, will translate into further cuts in education spending and jeopardize many of the recent gains.

“Take away the resources, and you can kiss the results goodby,” Honig said.

California calculates the dropout rate by tallying the numbers of students who leave school between 10th and 12th grades without turning to some alternative way to earn a diploma or its equivalent. When a student has been gone from school for 45 days and has not turned up at a private or other public campus, he or she is counted as a dropout.

Beginning this school year, the state is tallying students who drop out as early as seventh grade.

DROPOUT RATES FOR L.A. COUNTY HIGH SCHOOLS: B2