Local Schools Score Well in Controversial Dropout Report

The annual political football game known as the state's assessment of school graduation and dropout rates has begun.

Banning Unified's 14 percent dropout rate is a third better than the statewide average of 21.7 percent, and Beaumont Unified's 17.6 is more than four percent better.

According to the California Department of Education, just over 70 percent of the state's high school students graduated in 2008-2009, up from 68.5 percent the previous year.  However, the "adjusted four-year derived dropout rate" of 21.7 percent also was up from 18.9 percent the previous year. 

But the trend may reflect more on how the state collected data than on the education system.

There isn't much quibble statewide with graduation rates, but dropout rates are another story.  The problem with tracking dropout rates, according to Banning Unified's Interim Assistant Superintendent Gordon Fisher, is that "when a child moves and they can't find him, the state considers the child dropped out.  We have students who are back and forth to Mexico frequently, and the system can't account for them."

Banning Unified's "adjusted four-year derived drop-out rate" was 14 percent.  Beaumont Unified's was 17.6 percent.  The statewide average was 21.7 percent.  But there are serious questions about what the new numbers mean.

Aware of tracking problems, the state education department was trying to switch to a new tracking system, the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS).  Last October, however, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took away a $6.8 million federal grant that had been set aside for CALPADS, effectively torpedoing the new tracking system in mid-switch, according to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.

""Unless funding is restored, the millions of dollars already invested in CALPADS will have been wasted," said O'Connell in a written statement, "and our state will be at ground zero in collecting student-level data, placing us last among the states in measuring student progress over time."

The statewide figures are further skewed because not every school district was able to do the switch to CALPADS properly and not every school fits neatly into the state's program.  

According to the department of education statement, "The dropout and graduation rates that CDE currently posts using an aggregate formula provide a reasonable estimate in most cases.  However, there are school-level configurations where these estimates do not work well."

 O'Connell claims that if incoming Gov. Jerry Brown doesn't restore Schwarzenegger's cuts and perhaps give CALPADS an additional $32 million, the switch to CALPADS collecting will have been a failed experiment. 

"I also urge the Legislature and Governor-elect to reconsider providing $32 million – just $5 per student – to support the workload associated with collecting, maintaining, and submitting student-level data," said O'Connell.  "The funding would help ensure quality student-level data are submitted to CALPADS that will help us develop policies that better serve our students."

CALPADS is designed to help overcome the data collection problems to which Fisher referred.  In CALPADS, each student entering California schools is assigned a Statewide Student Identifier, known to educators as an SSID.  CALPADS follows the numbers and would find a student who enrolled in a different California school instead of counting the student as a dropout.

A problem is that CALPADS stops at the border of California;  students who move out of state may still wind up being counted as dropouts.

In the meantime, the state education department warned against making too many decisions based on the numbers released. 

"Caution should be used when analyzing this first year of data through CALPADS," according to the state education department statement. "There is always some variance in the information gathered in the first year of using a new data system."

Some schools were unable to switch to CALPADS, said the state education department, because they lacked resources to do so.

Next year the dropout data picture will be even murkier.

"Comparing the 2008-09 rates released today to the 2009-10 rates to be released next year will not be possible," according to the state education department, "because the four-year cohort rate will be calculated in a  different manner than the previous years."