Numbers Game

If you accept the school district’s official numbers, Los Angeles Unified is doing a pretty good job of keeping kids from dropping out. The official dropout rate is a mere 5.7% districtwide. At some schools -- even inner-city schools -- the numbers have been even better. Manual Arts High School near downtown, for example, claimed a recent annual dropout rate of just 0.1%.

The problem is, the numbers just don’t add up.

Begin with last year’s reported dropout rate of 5.7%. That’s a one-year rate. So for a more accurate picture, multiply that number by four, to account for four years of dropouts from each class during the years of high school. That adjusted number would suggest a dropout rate more like 23%. For a truer picture still, compare last year’s number of graduates (27,720) with the size of that same class six years earlier, as seventh-graders (44,120). That group of students shrank by more than 37%, even though districtwide enrollment has been rising.

Throughout California, schools have made a science of underreporting their true dropout rates. The fabrication is so institutionalized that, year after year, school systems, including L.A. Unified, have cited low dropout rates as a sure sign that schools have improved. The truth is that any school has been able to make a high dropout rate go away simply by gaming the numbers.

A federal study in the mid-1990s estimated that California undercounted dropouts in one year by more than 70%. Officially, the state defines dropouts as students who leave school before graduating and who do not have their academic records forwarded to another school within 45 school days.

But reporting practices and deadlines string out this process further. The result is that schools have up to 18 months to locate missing students and then can use any number of loopholes to avoid counting them as dropouts.

Practices in place to identify and report dropouts virtually guarantee inaccurate data. A student could miss an entire year of school, for example, then show up for one day in June, and not be counted as a dropout. Nor is a student who is arrested and sent to juvenile hall considered a dropout -- on the theory that because juvenile hall has classes, being sent there is like transferring to a new school. The district doesn’t even monitor dropout rates before high school, so a student who leaves during or immediately after middle school isn’t counted as a dropout. If a counselor hears from another student that a missing student has, say, moved back to Mexico and is attending school there, that’s enough to eliminate the child from the dropout rolls if the counselor deems it so. Moreover, the state never audits a school’s dropout statistics. Neither does L.A. Unified. So in reality, with recording data, anything goes.

Citing privacy concerns, the school district won’t allow reporters to match its dropout records with actual students -- a policy that makes analyzing its reporting techniques difficult. One student I was able to track, a Manual Arts dropout named Yecenia, who asked that her last name not be used, went with her boyfriend to Texas and therefore didn’t attend school from mid-May to February of the following year. She was never listed as a dropout, however, even though she clearly considered herself one.

School administrators often object to comparing the number of incoming seventh-graders with the number of graduates from that same group six years later. They contend that many of the disappeared students aren’t dropouts, that they’ve simply transferred to other schools. But if students were transferring to other schools and then graduating rather than dropping out, the cumulative numbers would back that up: The students would show up somewhere. They don’t.

Other school districts offer the same sorry excuses to justify unbelievably low reported dropout rates. A state education staff member made a stark assessment of the situation. “Someone’s lying, it’s just that simple. Or someone’s underreporting -- I guess that’s a better way of saying it,” said Marco Orlando of the state’s counseling and student support office.

“Obviously school districts don’t want to acknowledge they have dropout problems and individual schools don’t, because it’s a bad reflection on public schools,” Orlando said.

One way that schools avoid labeling students dropouts is by shunting would-be dropouts off to adult schools. But that’s frequently more of a statistical dodge than a solution. Fewer than 4% of first-year, adult-school students either complete graduation credits or obtain a General Educational Development certificate, according to data released last year in response to a Public Records Act request.

So although the district doesn’t have to count a student as having dropped out -- adult school dropouts are not counted in the district’s totals -- students who leave regular high school for adult school aren’t likely to finish school, according to researchers. A U.S. Department of Education study, which analyzed California data from 1993 through 1995, estimated that doing nothing more than properly classifying adult-school transfers as dropouts would have raised dropout totals statewide 36% to 72% depending on the year.

So why should we care about those kids who drop out but never make it into the count of dropouts? A student who has become statistically invisible is one who is less likely to be helped. And dropping out matters. Some 35% of high school dropouts are unemployed, and those who have jobs typically labor at the low end of the wage scale, without health benefits, job security or much prospect of something better, according to the Washington-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice. Moreover, 75% of minors sentenced to adult prison have not completed the 10th grade, and 82% of adult prison inmates never finished high school. Some experts contend that whether a student drops out is a surer predictor of that youth’s future than test scores.

Students who left regular school to get GEDs fared about as badly as dropouts. “Counting GEDs in the same group as those awarded regular diplomas [also] masks the true graduation rate,” wrote Jay P. Greene, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author of a landmark dropout study commissioned by the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Greene counts GED holders and adult-school transfers as dropouts -- because both groups have left high school and suffer accordingly. Greene concluded that only 56% of LAUSD’s entering eighth-graders in 1993 graduated on time in 1998.

But the easy out of simply not counting dropouts may be ending soon.

Federal funding has been granted to support a nascent statewide system that should, by mid-2005, begin to track students individually. If a student leaves one school and doesn’t show up somewhere else, it will be obvious.

And the state has said it will begin next fall to conform to federal guidelines for recording dropouts, which means, for one thing, that the school districts can no longer avoid counting a dropout by transferring that student to adult school.

“Accurate tracking and reporting of dropouts is critical in our efforts to address this serious issue,” said state Deputy Supt. Susie Lange, in a surprisingly frank memo to school district superintendents. “The current discrepancy between graduates and dropouts ... leaves a large number of students unaccounted for, and unanswered questions about where these students have gone.”

But recording the numbers accurately addresses only a piece of the problem.

These counts matter, in large part, because school districts have less incentive to fix a problem when they claim it doesn’t exist in the first place. Still, the more crucial piece is preventing dropouts in the first place -- and tempting students back to school if they leave. A cynic could suggest that L.A. Unified doesn’t want these students back -- it can’t even properly house and educate the ones it has. But the status quo is so unacceptable that this problem, too, must be confronted and worked out.

Though low dropout rates frequently have no connection with reality, they are good for a school’s or a principal’s reputation. In the case of Manual Arts, the claimed reduction in dropouts helped put former Principal Wendell Greer on center stage at a 1999 Washington press conference with then-President Clinton. L.A. Unified hosted its own media call to celebrate Manual Arts’ achievements. One person in attendance recalled that six TV crews showed up.

If only things had worked out as well for the students.