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Texas and K-12 education go together like Longhorns and Aggies.
...Texas High School freshmen will eventually drop out of public school...
Dallas NewsAUSTIN – One out of three Texas students don't graduate, and more students drop out than finish high school in the state's largest cities, according to education experts.
Statewide, more than 2.5 million students have dropped out of Texas high schools in the last 20 years, and each graduating class loses about 120,000 students from freshman year to senior year, according to the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association.
The research group says more than half of students in Texas' largest cities drop out. The dropout rate among blacks, Hispanics and low-income students is about 60 percent, according to the Center for Education at Rice University.
The statewide dropout rate is about 33 percent – or 20 points higher than what the Texas Education Agency reports.
Those are a amazing numbers of dropouts.
Texas and K-12 education go together like Longhorns and Aggies.
Let me guess Boutons your answer would be to tax us some more and all the educational problems would go away.
Fixing Texas K-12 won't be cheap, esp paying salaries that attract quality people as teachers.
Texas is mostly in the bottom half to bottom on lots of k-12 measures nationally.
http://www.cpa.state.tx.us/comptrol/wwstand/wws0512ed/
Texas barely spends more than nearby highly advanced centers of culture and education like LA and AL.
http://www.asbj.com/evs/05/EVS05_southcentral.pdf
Everyone wants great schools but nobody wants to pay for them. I don't give a
You get what you pay for. Sorry if that's not what you want to hear.
That's a good at ude to have.
IIRC, it has to do with the way TEA tracks dropouts and the various reasons behind that. I remember reading a good article about it a few years ago, let me see if I can find it.
From the Express-News archives:
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Vanished teen-agers leave gaps in head count
Seventy-six former students at Holmes are still unaccounted for
so true drop-out total is a mystery
Sharon K. Hughes Express-News Staff Writer
Publication Date : May 27, 2001
Seventy-six missing young people from the Holmes High School freshman class of 1997 leave the school's true dropout rate as anyone's guess.
The San Antonio Express-News and the Northside School District tracked the 1,053 freshmen who were at Holmes four years ago to find out if they were dropouts, in school, graduates or the recipients of General Educational Development certificates.
After nine months of searching by school officials, reporters, news researchers and a private investigator 76 students from the original class remain missing.
The Express-News confirmed that at least 167 teens have dropped out from the Holmes class, pushing the dropout rate to 15.9 percent, compared with the most recent official rate of 9.2 percent.
Patterns followed by dropouts before they leave school - such as transferring several times and repeating ninth grade - suggest that at least 26 of the missing students could also be dropouts. That would raise the Holmes dropout rate to 18.3 percent - nearly double the most recent official count for the Class of 1999.
Al Kauffman, legal counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in San Antonio, said he believes the missing students "are almost all dropouts."
He based his assessment on the demographic breakdown of the students who dropped out and the students who could not be found by the newspaper. In both groups, high percentages of students were retained in the ninth grade and the majority of them were economically disadvantaged - two factors with a strong correlation to dropping out.
Looking at the newspaper's findings, he said the dropout rate would be about 30 percent, which includes confirmed dropouts, the missing or lost students, and GED recipients.
Uri Treisman, director of the University of Texas Charles A. Dana Center, suspects the true rate is about 20 percent - between the rate estimated by Kauffman and the state's last report for Holmes.
Treisman noted that the missing students from Holmes include a higher-than-expected number of African-American teens. He suspects that some of those students may be military transfers who are enrolled in school somewhere, because studies have shown that black military families are transferred more often than those of other ethnicities.
Treisman said some other students may be in adjacent school districts but haven't shown up on enrollment records.
The Express-News agreed to keep the iden ies of students confidential unless they agreed to talk. The stories of the missing students - each of whom was assigned a number - indicate how difficult it is to find them:
Nos. 37 and 43 - One said she was going to Vermont; the other told the school he was headed for California. Researchers couldn't find so much as a second address for either of them.
No. 116 went to Harlandale High School in 1998, to Clemens High School in 1999, then to Roosevelt High School, Highlands High School and to East Central High School before he disappeared.
No. 16 went to Building Alternatives Charter School for a few months after leaving Holmes, then just stopped attending.
Most of the in-state transfers who didn't show up at the next school and were found by the Express-News turned out to be dropouts, particularly those who said they were going to San Antonio-area school districts.
Those who bounced from school to school were the most difficult to find. Those who were changing programs - going from a regular high school to an alternative school, then leaving - were most likely to drop out. A few, however, turned up later in yet another school.
Mobility may be the biggest barrier to getting an accurate dropout rate.
Without credit histories or utility bills, teens don't leave much of a trail. The only place they do exist under their own names and Social Security numbers is in school. Otherwise, they are extensions of their parents. When researchers found parents, they often found the missing students.
But if a teen leaves home, school or doesn't have his school records follow him, then he can just vanish.
National studies have shown that about half the students who changed school three or more times between eighth and 12th grade dropped out, said Phillip Kaufman of MPR Associates Inc., an educational research firm in Berkeley, Calif.
There were exceptions to all these patterns at Holmes.
One student went from Holmes to Harlandale, but she left before reporters called that school district. Months later it was learned that she transferred to the Southwest School District. When that district was called, officials said she returned to Harlandale, where she was still enrolled.
At Holmes, 28 percent of students leave during the school year. An additional 30 percent don't return after summer break. Meanwhile, enrollment at the school continues to rise. New students constantly replace those who leave. Fewer than half of the original 1,053 freshmen from the Class of 2001 are still at Holmes this year.
The state considers students mobile if they miss six weeks of the year at a particular school. The statewide mobility rate is 22 percent for 1998-99, the last year available. The mobility rate at Holmes that year was 21.7 percent.
The Intercultural Development Research Association, a San Antonio-based think tank, suggests that missing students should have their own category in the official state dropout count.
Criss Cloudt, the Texas Education Agency's associate commissioner for accountability reporting and research, said that because the state uses the dropout rate in the accountability system, then it must count actual dropouts and not use estimates. She questions, however, whether it is worth the state's resources to try to count every dropout.
Cloudt said that taking measures to improve the information schools submit to the TEA will help reduce the number of missing students.
There was some evidence of that at Holmes. In the past two years, since the TEA has been tracking many in-state transfers, Holmes has kept more detailed records. The agency still doesn't check an individual school's transfers, however, unless it suspects the school of cheating on enrollment reports.
"You have to make a choice," Cloudt said. "How long do you want (school officials) to follow up on the kid?"
The state can invest more money into improving the reporting of dropouts or it can put the money into such things as school safety, curriculum or teacher salaries.
Said Cloudt, "Think of the trade-off."
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Counts don't add up
Study finds Holmes' dropout rate much higher than state's tally
Story by Lucy Hood, Edmund S. Tijerina and Sharon K. Hughes San Antonio Express-News Staff
Publication Date : May 27, 2001
The dropout rate at one San Antonio high school is more than 70 percent higher than the state's most recent tally for the campus, calling into question the way Texas accounts for dropouts.
At least 167 of the 1,053 freshmen who enrolled at Holmes High School four years ago have dropped out, according to a nine-month study by the San Antonio Express-News. An additional 76 students are missing and could not be found by the newspaper or the school district, an indication that many of them also dropped out.
The number of confirmed dropouts equals a rate of at least 15.9 percent - 73 percent higher than the most recent official dropout rate at Holmes, 9.2 percent for the Class of 1999. The Texas Education Agency reported a dropout rate at the school of 5.5 percent the year before.
This year's official dropout rate will not be released until next summer.
TEA officials attribute most of the disparity to different counting methods. The state bases its dropout counts on first-year freshmen, excluding students who repeat the ninth grade. The Express-News' study was based on the entire freshman class of four years ago, including students who had repeated the ninth grade.
Critics who study the different methods say the newspaper's findings are evidence that the state uses a flawed system that puts public schools in a flattering light while ignoring many of the students those schools failed to educate.
Keeping an accurate dropout count is more important than ever because the rate is used as a measure of school performance. In Texas, the dropout rate is combined with test scores to hold schools accountable for their quality of education. The state can, but rarely does, overhaul low-performing schools by replacing administrators and teachers and allowing students to transfer to better schools.
"TEA has been playing a Texas-sized s game on the matter of counting dropouts," said Boston College professor Walt Haney, who conducted a two-year study of the state's school accountability system. "Every source of evidence other than the TEA shows Texas as having one of the worst dropout rates among the states."
Northside School District Superintendent Ed Rawlinson said the Express-News' findings were realistic, but they also illustrate the complexity involved in determining the true dropout rate.
"Public schools don't have the resources to match the Express-News' effort on a routine basis," he said. "I hope that the Express-News' study will convince TEA and the Legislature of the difficulties of obtaining reliable data."
To assess the extent of the dropout problem, the newspaper last fall began to track the 1,053 freshmen who enrolled at Holmes in the 1997-98 school year. Holmes was chosen for the study because it is one of the most diverse high schools in San Antonio and, with 3,000 students, represents a typical large urban school in Texas.
The school district cooperated with the Express-News and provided the entire student roll for the research, including students' names and addresses. The newspaper agreed to keep students' names confidential, unless they agreed to be quoted in interviews.
The newspaper and school district compared names with enrollment and transfer records and attempted to track down students who transferred more than once. Reporters also knocked on doors to find missing students and sent a survey to the reported address of every student who wasn't enrolled, sometimes following up with a second and third mailing.
When it hit a dead end with the missing students, the newspaper hired private investigator Manuel Alfaro to track down those who could not be found. Alfaro, a San Antonio investigator for 12 years, located 46 students.
The study found that more than half - 652 of the original 1,053 students - are still in school, and most will graduate this year from Holmes or another high school.
Of the 401 students who left school, the newspaper found that 167 dropped out, 86 had graduated and 70 received General Educational Development certificates. Two students died.
The remaining 76 disappeared. Neither the school district nor any state agency knows where these students are.
The study found that many of the dropouts had been out of school for several years, had no diploma and had not enrolled in an alternative program. In some cases, they said they would attend home school, but they never did. Others said they were transferring to another Texas school, but they never showed up.
Brandy Cuffin was an early dropout. Her mother filed a form three years ago declaring her intent to home-school Brandy, who then was a freshman.
Today, Brandy is almost 20, has not been at Holmes or in home school for three years and has no diploma or GED certificate. She is staying with an aunt in Alaska.
But the state will never record Brandy as a dropout. Under state policy, school districts are not allowed to check up on students after they leave for a home school. Schools have no way to determine whether they stayed in the school, transferred or dropped out.
Home-schooling is one of 24 exemptions from the dropout rate permitted by the state. The TEA also lets schools exempt students who enrolled in a certified GED program, who are in jail or state child-protective custody or who reported their intent to return to their home country.
The missing students are a source of contention among researchers. The San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association says many are likely to be dropouts. The organization believes the Texas dropout rate could be as high as 40 percent, a dramatic increase over the 8.5 percent statewide rate reported by the TEA.
The research association, a think tank that focuses on educational equity and is the chief critic of the state's dropout reporting method, arrived at the figure by using an attrition rate, the simple difference between the freshman class and the number of graduates four years later. State education officials say that standard is misleading because any student who leaves public school without a diploma - including those who receive a GED or transfer out of Texas - are counted by the IDRA as dropouts.
"Everybody thinks that either you are or you're not a dropout, and it's an extremely complex issue," said Criss Cloudt, the TEA's top administrator for the state's accountability system. "There are lots of different methods of counting kids, and you're going to get different results with different methods. This represents the inappropriateness of looking at an attrition rate as a dropout rate."
Researchers with the IDRA maintain that too many children who do not finish school are overlooked because of the state's failure to keep an accurate count of dropouts.
"A lot of people in the state of Texas prefer to hide the dimensions of the problem and continue with this head-in-the-sand existence," IDRA founder Jos‚ C rdenas said. "Unless you admit to the existence of a problem, there will be no solution."
The 'wrong crowd'
The stories of dropouts found in the study are strikingly similar. They skipped school; they fell behind in their class work. In some cases, they felt like they didn't belong because they fell in with the "wrong crowd" and were shunned by the "in" crowd.
Students in the wrong crowd often went to the mall during the school day or hung out at someone's house. Sometimes drugs were involved, and in other cases gangs played a role.
Lenard Samaniego Jr. said he "was associated with gangs."
"They'd come to me if they had problems," he said.
Samaniego, 18, was known at Holmes for his fighting prowess. Whenever there was trouble, particularly between blacks and Hispanics, he said, he was called on to throw the punches.
"I was respected," he said.
Samaniego has been out of school for almost two years and has started a family. His fiancee, 18-year-old Erica Gutierrez, will graduate Friday at Holmes.
"We decided, since I wasn't much in trouble and had good grades, I might as well finish," she said.
The two met when they were freshmen and had their first child the next year. Erica is five months' pregnant with their second. They plan to get married at the end of June.
Samaniego, who recently found work at Taco Cabana, had what seemed like a promising job installing office cubicles when he left school. Hired as a temp, he earned $6.50 to $7 an hour.
"I dropped out for that job," he said, adding that he put in about 80 hours a week. But when he asked to be hired on a full-time basis, he was turned down and quit.
He wishes he could look forward to receiving a high school diploma with the Class of 2001.
With that diploma, he said, "I would've had a better chance of more job opportunities and being able to go to college straight."
Studies show dropouts are more likely to get stuck in low-paying and dead-end jobs. They also are more likely to get in trouble. Most of the inmates in state and federal prisons are dropouts.
Jennifer Cuellar, 18, dropped out two years ago. She struggled with algebra and English and said she needed more help in those classes than her teachers were willing to give.
Her math teacher at Ross Middle School "was helping me real good," she said, "and going through it step by step."
But at Holmes, she said, "they'd give me at ude because I was always asking for help and stuff."
Most of the dropouts who responded to the Express-News' survey said they had trouble with algebra. The subject, a required high school credit, is widely cited as a "gatekeeper" course that often is poorly taught and holds back a disproportionate number of students.
Cuellar also said she had family problems, but she provided few details. Her mother, she said, has a temper, so she has spent her teen years going back and forth between her grandparents' house and her mother's house.
After leaving school, she worked as a clerk in the Bexar County Courthouse and at a McDonald's.
"I want to find a clothing job, like at Melrose or the Family Dollar Store," she said. "I just don't want to work in no fast-food restaurants."
Retention a factor
Cuellar and Samaniego failed the ninth grade, thereby increasing their chances of dropping out of school.
The study of Holmes found an overwhelming correlation between those students who repeated at least one year of school and those who dropped out. Of the dropouts, 92 percent repeated a grade - in most cases, the ninth.
The findings show what educators have known for a long time, said Uri Treisman, director of the Charles A. Dana Center, an educational research branch at the University of Texas at Austin. Holding back students has a greater impact on their overall success in school than any other factor, such as race, sex or socioeconomic status, he said.
"This says we need to organize efforts to keep children with their age (group)," he said, "and that raises special challenges for those who support President Bush's anti-social-promotion initiatives."
The measure, part of then-Gov. George W. Bush's education program two years ago, will hold back children beginning in the 2002-03 school year if they fail the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Legislation was introduced this year to delay the initiative, but the bill failed.
The newspaper's findings suggest that holding back students to make sure they are academically ready increases the risk that some - particularly in high school - will drop out.
The study also found that:
Many of the dropouts left school to start a family, a trend all too common in Bexar County, which has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country.
Students who left school to work have bounced from one low-end job to another.
The typical Holmes dropout is a Hispanic boy from a low-income family. Of the confirmed dropouts, nearly 87 percent are Latino, nearly 60 percent male, and about 69 percent are eligible for a subsidized lunch, a federal measure of family poverty.
"That's common. You'll find that anyplace you look in Texas," said Steve Murdock, the state demographer and a professor of rural sociology at Texas A&M University. "They (dropouts) are predominantly Hispanic and Hispanic male."
This poses a significant challenge for Lone Star State residents in 30 years, when Hispanics, African-Americans and other minorities are expected to make up two-thirds of the population. Nearly half, or 46 percent, will be Hispanic, according to projections.
"The educational achievement of our minorities is a critical thing for Texas," Murdock said. "How well Texas does depends on how well our African-American and Hispanic populations are doing, particularly our Hispanic population."
Jason Trevino encountered many of the risk factors in his short tenure at Holmes.
A teen-age father, he failed the ninth grade and was involved in gang activity. He was 16 when he dropped out in January 1998.
Trevino's brother was killed by a rival gang member, and he, too, feared for his life.
"The cops, they were unfair," he said. "They were always chasing you and trying to nail you for any little thing, and they liked to abuse you while they were doing that.
"I didn't want to attend no more because of all that drama," he said.
Motivated by the birth this year of his daughter, Trevino said he works more than 40 hours a week at Pizza Hut and about 30 hours a week helping his father with his air conditioning repair business.
Trevino said he is happy with his life, but if he could start over, he would do things differently.
"I would love to walk the stage the way all my other classmates did," he said.
Like Brandy Cuffin, Trevino will not be counted as a dropout. He went down in state records as a home-school student because that was his intention when he left Holmes. His home-schooling lasted for about two weeks.
True count's importance
Dropout prevention programs, counseling and the efforts of attendance officers failed to keep these students in school. Help often arrives too late to catch students who became disengaged well before the ninth grade.
The solution is to develop programs that will help troubled students with the gamut of problems they face - academic, behavioral and family - and the earlier the better, said Russell Rumberger, an education professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a recognized dropout-prevention expert.
"For high-risk kids, you have to design a system that accommodates those kinds of kids, and if you don't do that, they aren't going to make it," he said.
Many educators fear Texas will not improve its school completion record if it doesn't acknowledge the scope of the dropout problem.
The TEA says annual enrollment reports show the Texas dropout rate has fallen. But its figures - derived from a complex formula that excludes thousands of students across the state - are contradicted by the Holmes study and by credible state and federal sources.
The National Center for Education Statistics says the percentage of Texans who have completed high school by age 24 has fallen for the past decade, placing the state 47th.
And the demographics of the students who are missing from Holmes fall in line with those who have dropped out, noted Treisman and Al Kauffman, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. For example, more than 80 percent of the missing teens were held back in school, increasing the likelihood that they dropped out.
Treisman and Kauffman estimate the school's true dropout rate to be closer to 25 percent.
"The (Texas) rates always come up very low compared to what most people seem to find as a routine experience in urban high schools," said Mark Dynarski, a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research Associates, a nonpartisan research group based in Princeton, N.J. "Something's amiss in the counting."
An accurate dropout figure is important, he said, because "you don't know which schools are doing well and which schools are doing badly until you count them properly."
Underestimating the problem also undermines efforts to ensure that Hispanics, who have the highest dropout rate nationwide - 34 percent of those between ages 18 and 24, according to the U.S. Census Bureau - will be able to keep up with work force demands. Given the growth of the Hispanic population, Dynarski said, improving their graduation rate is paramount.
But for the moment, "this is all going in the wrong direction," he said.
"If these kids (the dropouts) are the ones paying my Social Security, then I'm in trouble," he said. "They're not economically viable, the job base is not going to move more heavily toward manufacturing. It's all going the other way."
Coming Monday: One thing in common: failing ninth grade
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