The Owl: Dropout Rates, Enron and Eroding Public Trust

ISSUE 46 | APRIL 25, 2002

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DROPOUT RATES MEET A SKEPTICAL PUBLIC

Last week the Department of Education (CDE) announced dropout rates of 2.8 percent statewide. This claim leaves citizens wondering what educators are counting. With the Census Bureau reporting about 25 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds lacking a high school diploma, something's amiss.

The Owl would first like to put this matter in context. After all, the castle of K-12 may have tall walls, but it is not an island. Surrounding the castle is a land where mistrust is the theme of the season. Corporation boards mistrust their firms' accountants (think Anderson Consulting). Shareholders mistrust their companies' financial statements (think Enron). Citizens mistrust the utility company (think PG&E). Catholics now mistrust their priests (think altar boys).

This is no time to strain the credulity of citizens. Yet this is exactly the effect of this dropout announcement. The Owl believes there are at least three factors at work.

CREDIBILITY GAP

If you look at the statewide freshman class of 1997, and then look at the class of graduating seniors four years later, this class is about 31 percent smaller. Yet, the CDE's "official" one-year dropout rate is 2.8 percent. This resembles not so much a gap as a yawning chasm.

This news story in the San Diego Union-Tribune of April 20 presents one of the clearest explanations of this credibility gap.

The reporters, Jill Spielvogel and Eleanor Yang, take the one-year "event" based dropout rate, and project it over four years (something the CDE calls the "four year derived dropout rate), yielding 11 percent. If you subtract this from the 31 percent attrition rate, this results in a credibility gap of about 20 percent.

THE LANGUAGE GAP

We simply have no vocabulary for discussing dropouts plainly. There is no shared frame of reference. What educators think is self-explanatory is often incomprehensible to citizens. We already know that 80 percent of the public, according to this survey by the research firm Public Agenda, is profoundly unclear what the terms "charter" and "voucher" mean. Why would we assume that they share the CDE's definition of a dropout as a student missing for 45 days who has not reenrolled elsewhere?

The worst misunderstanding, in this Owl's opinion, is that dropouts in California are reported as a one-year "event" rate: all those who dropout from grades 9-12 in one year. Much of the public thinks of dropout rates as attrition, over a four-year period of time, from a single class (i.e., graduating class of 2001).

THE STATISTICAL GAP

Since we have no student identification system yet, tracing dropouts requires districts to do the work of private investigators. Calling, tracing, poking around to find students who are AWOL for 45 days is a crafty art, to be sure. But it is not like an exacting one, let alone science. It is imprecise at best, like most detective work.

(Click here to read some more hopeful news on an emerging bill that would put a mini-student information system on a fast-track.)

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Reality based reporting works best. If you report annual enrollments for your last three high school graduating classes, you'll be speaking the public's language. This means: counting what matters (enrollment); and counting what can be counted accurately (warm butts in chairs on CBEDS census day).

2. Provide the media and your board with background on the complexity of calculating dropout rates before you do anything. A candid disclosure of declining enrollments from grades 9 to 12, together with dropout data, will earn you more kudos than gloating over unreal numbers that simply look good.

For more information, read this excellent research review by Education Week's veteran reporter, Deb Viadero.

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