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Half of Calif. Blacks and Latinos Drop Out of School, a New Harvard Study Finds NewsMax.com"Dropout factories" is how a new Harvard study describes some California schools, finding that dropout rates for Latinos and black students are abysmal. Just 50.2 percent of black boys who entered ninth grade in the Golden State received a diploma four years later. The dropout problem on the whole has been underestimated, says The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, which called for improvements to dropout rate calculation methods and more accountability over the high number of dropouts.
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The state has reported a graduation rate of 87 percent. Researchers using a different methodology found an overall graduation rate of 71 percent for 2002. They also found that graduation rates for minority students were significantly lower - 57 percent rate for blacks, 60 percent for Hispanics and 52 percent for American Indians. For minority males, the figures were 50 percent for blacks, 54 percent for Hispanics and 46 percent for American Indians. The graduation rate reflects the percentage of 9th grade students who graduate with a regular diploma with their 12th grade class. The figures were released ahead of a conference on graduation rates starting today in Los Angeles, which is expected to draw about 400 education researchers, teachers and policy makers. "A diploma is a passport to economic success. If our high schools can't get students the education they need, that will be ... an economic and social problem moving forward into the next generation," researcher Christopher Swanson of the nonprofit Urban Institute in Washington, which produced data for the report released by Harvard's Civil Rights Project, told the Los Angeles Times. The San Francisco Chronicle lists three other amazing statistics from the study, illustrating the racial and income gaps in California's school system:
Gary Orfield, director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project, said the current graduation rate reporting system is "extremely inadequate" because it allows high school principals and staff to report whether students dropped out or transferred. "There's no incentive for them to report that they dropped out and they can easily report that they transferred someplace else because nobody ever checks up on the data," Orfield said. "There's almost no money invested at the state level or the federal level in determining whether people actually graduate." The revised method developed by the Urban Institute is more accurate because it uses enrollment data that are tracked through grade levels, Orfield said. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said the study's results weren't surprising because the state has long known of the academic gap among minority students. "Do we have a dropout problem? Yes," he told the Chronicle. He also said the state needs High School reform, and blasted Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget a "devastating" to necessary school programs like the arts and athletics, even though the problems described inthe Harvard study all occured under the man Arnold replaced, ousted Governor Gray Davis. Orfield added that California is by no means alone with its problems. "We found there is systematic misreporting of data across the country - and very little effort to deal with it." The Associated Press contributed to this report
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