Tuning in to dropouts

BETWEEN ONE-QUARTER and one-half of L.A. students drop out between their freshman year of high school and diploma time. And that’s about as specific as anyone gets about dropouts these days.

This is troubling on two counts. Parents, schools and taxpayers should have a much better grasp of how many students are giving up and heading to an adulthood filled with go-nowhere jobs -- if they can find jobs at all. And whatever number is correct, it’s unacceptably high.

A 2005 report from the Civil Rights Project research center (which this year moved from Harvard University to UCLA) said that close to half of ninth-graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District drop out before completing high school. The number is almost certainly inflated. For one thing, it doesn’t take into account the 25% of L.A. Unified families that move every year, often out of the district.

But the study forced school leaders to address a disgrace they had long tucked away. It gave Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a bell to ring about school failures. And it drew attention to the district’s own statistical manipulations that long made dropout rates look artificially low.

Confronted with evidence of a crisis, district officials at first blamed impoverished students and indifferent parents. They pointed out improvements in elementary test scores, as though that was somehow relevant. A proposal to remake 10 of the district’s worst middle and high schools never gained much traction. Classic LAUSD: defend, deflect and delay.

But the outcry remained, and the district has since taken sensible steps. Dropout prevention advisors track down absentees and talk to families. Schools report their truancy rates monthly. Huge, impersonal high schools are shrinking to small learning communities. Career training -- which struggling students say would help keep them in school -- is finally gaining ground.

Now that structural changes are underway, the district needs to hone in where it counts: instruction. Teachers of younger students must do a better job of preparing them for higher-level work, an instructional basic that the district has never mastered. Middle schools should not be able to pass failing students along so that they become some algebra teacher’s liability later. And the district has taken only tentative steps toward putting top teachers in low-performing schools, where students already at risk of dropping out are too often placed in the care of weak instructors.

There is no magic wand. Even at the Green Dot charter schools, which the mayor has held up as a model for transforming L.A. Unified, a quarter of students don’t graduate. Still, it is not too much to ask the district for honest accounting and a better performance at keeping students in school.