SEATTLE — In six years, Washington high schools have made enough progress helping kids earn a diploma to have nine fewer schools on a national list of so-called “dropout factories,” according to a report released Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in nearly 5 percent of Washington’s 500 high schools, 40 percent of the students enrolled as freshmen still don’t make it to their senior year, according to the report from America’s Promise Alliance.
The group decided not to release the names of the 23 schools it considers “dropout factories” in Washington or the list for any other state. That answers some of the criticism from school districts like Tacoma, which disputed the findings three years ago when five of its high schools were labeled as dropout factories.
The researchers failed to look at the way Tacoma moves high school students through its system, keeping them as freshmen until they had the credits to be sophomores and so on, said Pat Cummings, director of research and evaluation for the Tacoma School District.
This approach is different from most districts where students move up each year and are held at the end until they earn the credits to graduate.
Because the researchers compared the number of students enrolled as freshmen to the number of students who graduate as seniors, graduation rates were not accurate for schools with what seems like an unusually large freshman class, Cummings said.
The state says all of Tacoma’s high schools are graduating more than 60 percent of the students who enter high school as freshmen, and most are close to the state average.
Other districts complained that the study released in 2007 did not take into account students who transferred to another high school. Washington state keeps track of its students by a unique identifier number and can track them from school to school. Graduation rates reflect those numbers.
During the past few years, Washington hasn’t improved its statewide graduation rate, which dropped from 72.2 percent in 2002 to 71.9 percent in 2008, but individual schools and districts have progressed, according to the report written by Civic Enterprises and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Washington leads the West in its efforts to improve graduation rates. It was 13th on a list of the 50 states, according to how much progress has been made in turning “dropout factory” schools into graduation factories.
Next in the West were Arizona and Colorado, which each have eight fewer schools on the list. Nevada and California have been moving in the opposite direction and are at the bottom of the “dropout factory” progress list, with gains of 26 and 27 respectively of low-graduation rate high schools.
The Washington state superintendent of public instruction remains concerned.
“The issue of dropouts has always been one of my top priorities. I do think we are making progress, but I am greatly concerned that our current budget crisis will have a negative impact,” Randy Dorn said Monday.
“Where I have seen progress in our state is in schools that make dropouts a top priority. It’s an attitude that they are going to make a difference and address this issue,” he said.
Dramatic progress in graduation rates is being made in states that call in all their resources, including volunteers, to make sure students are getting the extra help they need in all grades, said John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises and one of the two lead co-authors of the report.
Bridgeland said those states, like Washington, that are raising their graduation requirements and actually making it harder to earn a diploma also are among those making the most progress.
“Washington definitely is making some progress,” Bridgeland said. He mentioned the growing number of students in the state who take Advanced Placement tests, as more evidence of Washington’s progress toward a college-prep curriculum.
Dorn said the state’s educators need to keep working on finding different ways to engage all students and make education relevant for them. That’s one of reasons Dorn believes career and technical education is an important pathway for some students after high school.
“Not every student will go to college, but most will have to find jobs, and if they can develop skills while in school, you’ve provided a great service for them,” he said.
Since 2002, the number of so-called “dropout factory” schools in the United States has declined by 13 percent nationally, resulting in at least 100,000 more students getting a high school diploma.
But the report says that’s not enough progress to meet President Barack Obama’s goal of graduating nine out of 10 students by 2020.
Washington state had about 10,000 fewer students attending dropout factory schools in 2008 than in 2002.
Washington’s rural districts made notable progress, possibly related to the last time this report was issued in 2007, when poor rural or urban districts were identified as the most likely places to find “dropout factory” schools in the state.
The report notes that progress also needs to be made in data collection about students and distribution of this information to educators. It mentioned Washington state as a leader in this area because of its efforts to combine K-12 data with early childhood, post-secondary education, work force and social service information.
Among the successful programs mentioned in the report were so-called “early college high schools,” which are collaborations between high schools and colleges. Several of these schools are running in Washington state.
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