Student success is at the heart of bills tackling dropout rate
Sacramento Bee 5/7/07
Now 20, the petite retail clerk is trying to pass the GED test in hopes of securing a higher-paying job at a medical clinic -- and a better life for her 4-year-old daughter, Maliyah Briggs.
"I just wish I would have stayed in school a long time ago," Scott said Wednesday night after enrolling at Fremont School for Adults in midtown Sacramento. "Then I wouldn't have to worry about taking all these tests."
Scott is far from alone. This spring, while most seniors are getting ready to don caps and gowns, roughly 145,000 students, or 30 percent of the senior class, might be missing out on a diploma and the opportunities that come with it. The estimate comes from a 2005 report by the state Legislative Analyst's Office.
Some state lawmakers are calling California's dropout rate an educational crisis, and civil rights groups say it's a problem that's disproportionately affecting African Americans and Latinos.
"We cannot afford to have thousands of young people without the education or skills they need to be productive adults in this society," said Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, who is among several legislators embarking on a multiyear effort to address the dropout rate. He has introduced a package of bills focused on making schools and districts more accountable for the success of their students.
At the heart of the package is a bill that proposes to tie a school's academic performance rating to its dropout rate. Steinberg's Senate Bill 219, which is now in the Senate Appropriations Committee, would change how the state calculates the Academic Performance Index, or API, to include students leaving a traditional high school during a school year to attend another high school or enter an alternative program.
The API uses a scale of 200 to 1,000 to rank school performance based on student test scores.
Bill Padia, deputy superintendent for assessment and accountability at the state Department of Education, said test scores of students who leave traditional high schools don't get counted now if they don't attend the full academic year. Alternative schools, which have their own performance index, don't count part-year students for the same reason.
"Students should be accounted for somewhere," Padia said.
Ray Culberson, director of youth services for San Bernardino City Schools, says SB 219 would make schools think twice before sending students off to an alternative school. An estimated 10 to 15 percent of the state's students are enrolled in alternative education programs.
The bill, Culberson said, also could improve the quality of alternative schools. Currently, only 16 percent of the state's 519 continuation schools have achieved high enough graduation rates and test scores to be called a model alternative school.
The California Federation of Teachers supports SB 219 in principle. However, the teachers group is seeking technical changes to the measure. Mike Weimer, a CFT legislative representative, said the current language inadvertently skews the index to favor high schools over elementary and middle schools because the bill ties a school's API score to the number of college and career training courses.
"Elementary schools don't have college career readiness training," Weimer said.
Steinberg also has proposed increasing the availability of college-prep and career technical classes in SB 405, expanding the number of high school students who simultaneously enroll in community colleges in SB 218, and offering more help to struggling middle schoolers in SB 344.
John Miller, principal of Fremont School for Adults, likes the sound of those bills. A counselor and administrator for more than three decades, Miller says parents and teachers can spot warning signs as early as elementary school.
"If they can get to these kids sooner, they can start remediation," Miller said. "By the time they get to high school, it's too late almost."
Lawmakers are homing in on alternative programs -- continuation schools, community schools and independent-study programs -- because that's where many students go when they begin to slip behind.
A February update by the Legislative Analyst's Office found that the dropout rate is significantly higher at alternative schools than at traditional high schools.
"Reported dropouts from alternative schools accounted for one-quarter of all high school dropouts in 2004-05, and dropout rates in alternative schools are at least two and one-half times higher than the statewide dropout rate," wrote Paul Warren of the Legislative Analyst's Office.
Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, who co-wrote SB 219, has her own bill that would gauge students' progress once they enroll in continuation school. SB 679 would require those schools to test students both when they enroll and when they leave, and would establish minimum-school-day requirements to make sure students spend enough time in class.
Other lawmakers are tackling a more fundamental question: how to define a "dropout."
Assembly Bill 477 by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, D-Van Nuys, and AB 519 by Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia, have similar proposals that seek to define that word.
The state now requires schools to count students as dropouts when they leave a school before completing the school year or when they don't return for the next grade. The state has outlined exceptions.
Levine's bill seeks to refine that definition by excluding students who transfer to alternative programs, go on to college or get their GEDs. Legislative analysts have cited concerns that the proposed definition doesn't address all the different scenarios.
Mendoza's broader bill directs the state superintendent of public instruction to develop a plan for collecting dropout data and to define "dropout."
Some analysts say little is known about the causes and effects of California's high dropout rate. Only recently has the state begun tracking students using a unique ID system through all four years of high school.
A professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is hoping to provide some answers soon. Russell Rumberger, director of the university's California Dropout Research Project, has received private grants totaling $850,000 to study the problem and calculate the cost to society for every student who doesn't get his or her diploma. Reports are expected as early as June.
For some dropouts, the cost already has been immeasurable.
At Fremont adult school, Scott, the 20-year-old single mother, sat in a classroom with a dozen other adults who aspire either to earn a high school diploma or to pass the GED test for a high school equivalency certificate.
One of the last to hand in her placement test and answer sheet, Scott was disappointed to learn that she would need five prep courses before she would be ready for the GED test. She was hoping to do better.
"I'm trying for my baby," she said, then walked down the hall with her class schedule in hand.