Drop Out Factories?

In a classic case of ratcheting things up with some colorful language, a Johns Hopkins researcher has coined a new term for schools with poor graduation rates – ‘dropout factories.’ The researcher, Bob Balfanz, uses that term to describe those schools where 60 percent or less of the students who are freshmen manage to still be in school during their senior year.

Unfortunately, according to Balfanz, that title fits 1700 high school or vocational schools in America, or roughly one of every ten schools at that age level. However, several of the dropout factories immediately questioned the method used by Balfanz to collect data.

As a subheading in the AP article summarizing the data, we also read: “U.S. putting new emphasis on boosting graduation rates for high schools.” Indeed, despite our President crowing that NCLB is closing the achievement gap, the ratio or percentage of dropouts essentially has not changed over the last decade. And to the surprise of no one that has been paying any attention to education, the so-called dropout factories occur mostly in large cities or in the high-poverty rural areas of the South and Southwest. All seem to have a high concentration of minority students.

As the AP article notes with unusual candor and insight, these “schools are tougher to turn around because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones — the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services.”

When the entire country is looked at as a whole, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular high school diploma. However, for Hispanic and black students, the percentage drops to 50 percent.