State’s High School Graduation Rate Rises for 6th Straight Year

The rate at which California students graduated from high school inched up again last year, continuing a six-year trend, according to data released by the state Wednesday.

About 68.7% of the class of 2000 received diplomas last year, up from the previous year’s 68.3%, figures from the California Department of Education show.

However, the same report indicated that only 11% of students who had enrolled in ninth grade four years earlier were officially listed as dropouts. Unaccounted for are the remaining one-fifth of students who began high school in 1996.

The department acknowledged that it has no way of telling how many of the missing students repeated grades, left the state, earned high school equivalency certificates, went to adult school or transferred to private schools.

Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction, said she was encouraged by the slight bump in the reported percentage of students graduating.

She said, however, that at a time when the job market requires more academic skills, “there is much more to be done to ensure that every student in California graduates from high school fully prepared to meet the future.”

Lowering the state’s dropout rate has been a goal since the mid-1980s, but California has yet to achieve the sort of sophisticated data-gathering system needed to track student mobility and other factors.

Such a computerized system, which ideally would assign each student an identification number, is being developed, but districts are not required to participate. The program is expected to be completed in 2005.

“We are moving very gradually to include more districts,” said Doug Stone, a spokesman for the education agency, “but we are still a minimum of four to five years away.”

Under state law, California’s new Academic Performance Index, the cornerstone of Gov. Gray Davis’ school accountability system, must include attendance and graduation data--but only once the department deems the figures to be accurate and complete.

Los Angeles County overall had a dropout rate of 13.8%. The proportion of dropouts soared in the Compton Unified School District to 33.7%, up from 7.6% the previous year. A state education official said the spike might have resulted from improved reporting.

The Los Angeles Unified School District reported a 21% dropout rate, down from 21.8% the previous year.

The department computed dropout rates by county, district and school as well as statewide. However, it calculated the graduation rate only on a statewide basis.

Donna Rothenbaum, a consultant in the department’s demographics office, said it is impossible to compute accurate graduation rates for individual schools, districts or counties. High turnover and transfers between schools can drastically change the makeup of a class at any given school, she said.

However, it is possible to calculate an approximate rate by dividing the number of graduates by the number of ninth-grade students who were enrolled four years earlier.

Consider Locke High School in Los Angeles, which enrolled 687 students in the ninth grade in 1996. Only 190, or less than 28% of the original enrollment, graduated in 2000.

For Los Angeles Unified, the graduation rate was just 50.7%.

Alan Bonsteel, a San Francisco physician and education watchdog who considers graduation rates to be more accurate than dropout rates, said California graduated its highest percentage of high school students in 1974-75, when the reported rate was 76.1%.

The dropout and graduation rate figures can be found on the Internet by clicking on Demographic Reports at: https://www.cde.ca.gov/demographics.