Five years later, high school dropouts still a problem

Submitted by lsanders on Mon, 08/31/2009 - 11:50

Every student.

When state leaders committed five years ago to making sure that every student graduated from high school “with the knowledge and skills he or she needs to succeed in college and the workplace,” they knew what they were getting into. That lofty goal in 2004 was going to drive a transformation in the state’s high school system so much so that all those high school dropouts across the state – 18,700 in that one year alone – would find success.

The State Board of Education’s Task Force on Quality High Schools for a Lifetime of Opportunities, which I helped staff for KnowledgeWorks Foundation, envisioned a high school system “where no students fall through the cracks” and “every Ohio student, regardless of his or her parents’ wealth, ethnic background or geographic location, gets an excellent education that instills lifelong passion for learning.” More on the task force report.

Five years later, you are reading this knowing that the state did not reach those goals.

In fact, things have gotten worse. Today, more students than ever are dropping out of high school – about 75,000 students over the past five years, enough to fill Cleveland Browns stadium and then some. And today, a smaller percentage of students are graduating from high school than four years ago, down nearly 2 percentage points. More on Ohio Education Matters report on high school dropouts.

What is more, even when students do graduate, we can’t be sure whether they are ready for college or the workplace. That’s because we now don’t think that our current 10th-grade Ohio Graduation Test – an exam required for graduation – is measuring the knowledge and skills necessary for students to be ready to succeed. While the state beefed up the course requirements for graduation, we know now that we need to do more in that area to meet the lofty goal of ensuring every student succeeds.

Thus, the high school system we had then is largely the high school system we have now.

Ohio’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Tave Zelman warned about this at the time. “If we keep doing in high school what we’ve always done in high school,” she said in 2004, “we’ll just keep falling farther and farther behind.”

So what happened?

For the first two years after the report, the state took action on improving its education standards, assessments and accountability for performance in high schools. As part of the national American Diploma Project, the state created a more rigorous college and work-ready curriculum in the Ohio Core and promised to create assessments that would measure whether students are ready for the workplace or college.

The state also added millions of tax dollars to private grant dollars to continue high school research and development in the Ohio High School Transformation Initiative and the Early College High School Network (both OHSTI and Early College initiatives werespearheaded by KnowledgeWorks Foundation).

The state began plans for investments into STEM high schools that emphasized proficiency in science, technology, engineering and math fields. There were also other scattered activities across the state to address high school and education issues.

Over the last two and a half years, a new administration continued investments into STEM high schools, Early College High Schools and high school research and development that began to pay off with results. More on high school results. In fall 2007, the state launched the Initiative for Increasing the Graduation Rate as a way to engage students at risk of dropping out. The initiative, which emphasizes social/emotional intervention strategies such as mentoring, provided programming at 33 urban schools for 5,500 boys, about half of whom were at high risk of dropping out.

In addition to state-level initiatives, many national improvement initiatives continue to be at work in Ohio, such as America’s Promise and The Data Quality Campaign. Another national program, High Schools That Work, has grown to include 20 high school sites with an additional eight opening for 2009-10. (The state, however, failed this year to continue to support Early College High Schools in the budget, though some state leaders are searching for alternative funding. More on budget cuts.)

Education reforms passed by the state this year have the potential to help schools begin moving the mark toward every child graduating ready for college and career. The state’s evidence- based school funding model for the first time ties funding to strategies proven to improve student performance, and those strategies can be expected to create classrooms that better engage and retain students. Other reforms are expected to strengthen teaching, increase expectations, and improve assessments of student performance – better linking what is taught in the classroom with what is needed to success in college and the workplace. More on education and funding reforms.

But the high school reforms thus far have not been widespread enough or deep enough to make a difference statewide or in most of the so-called “dropout factory” high schools in the state, and the proposed reforms just passed this year will likely be implemented slowly due to a lack of sufficient state resources. And the state has done very little to champion the notion in the task force report that schools and communities together need to take ownership of the high school problems.

The momentum for high school reform seems to be lost.

But I believe there is hope. State leaders express a commitment to every student and have laid out plans that could do just that. Some state high school initiatives, like Early College High Schools, have shown that they can dramatically increase graduation rates and reduce dropout rates and just need funding and support to expand their reach.

And state leaders, like State Superintendent Deborah Delisle, have a strong track record on the local level in high school reform, boldly shifting the way it has always been to something better that works for all high school students.

Every student?

Could that really happen?

“We believe this is possible,” wrote the co-chairs of the high school task force five years ago, “that it is largely a question of political will.”

Five years later, high school dropouts still a problem

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