California’s Dropout Factories

New research from Johns Hopkins University reveals schools with annual graduation rates of only 60 percent. These “dropout factories” are common in California, where more than one in 10 high schools fits the description.

California’s education establishment, when not cooking the books on the dropout rate, likes to blame low-income students for poor academic performance. The trouble is that at nearly 25 percent of California’s dropout factories, less than half of the students qualify as poor. If these students were solely responsible for their schools’ low graduation rates, schools with the fewest low-income students should do better. Unfortunately, they don’t.

In fact, seven California dropout factory high schools reported no low-income students at all. Yet their graduation rates ranged from 28 percent at Johanna Boss High School in Stockton, to 59 percent at Everett Alvarez High in Salinas. That range is nearly identical to the two dropout factory high schools reporting 100-percent student poverty rates: Locke High School in Los Angeles with a 27-percent graduation rate and Sacramento’s Grant Joint Union High School where 58 percent of students graduate.

California’s education establishment sees increased spending as the answer to every problem. Higher spending, however, doesn’t necessarily translate into higher graduation rates. Consider San Pasqual Valley High School in Winterhaven, which at a whopping $16,000 per student per year, outspends every other California dropout factory school. Twenty other schools on the list had higher student poverty rates. They exceeded Valley High’s 51-percent graduation rate while spending up to $7,000 less. So money is not the answer.

California is staring down the barrel of a budget shortfall of $10 billion. The Golden State simply cannot afford to dump hundreds of millions into anti-dropout schemes lacking accountability measures to distinguish effective programs from ineffective ones.

“The more you fail, the more money they throw at you,” explains Locke High School principal Frank Wells. “We’re filthy rich; I don’t want any more of your money.” For Wells, freedom to use education funds productively is critical to success, and research backs him up.

On this point, the Johns Hopkins University findings square with the hundreds of scientific analyses spanning three decades by scholars from such leading institutions as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia University’s Teachers College. The empirical evidence also reveals steps California policymakers can take toward breaking the dropout-cycle without breaking the bank.

First, enact promised finance reforms that give schools flexibility over their budgets in exchange for full public disclosure about how those funds are used. This is not a difficult matter. The Texas department of education simply posts downloadable versions of schools’ budgets on its Check Register website.

Second, students at risk for dropping out are readily identifiable years before they enter high school based on attendance, behavior, and failure in math or English. Students with even one of those factors have less than a 20-percent chance of graduating from high school on time. Schools need flexibility to intervene effectively. If they don’t, parents should be able to use their children’s education funding to seek out better alternatives.

Third, consider the value of educational choice. As the research shows, simply giving parents more freedom to choose their children’s schools, public or private, yields the same improvement in math achievement on the Nation’s Report Card as raising per-pupil spending by more than $3,000 or increasing the median household income by $7,300. Low-income students who use vouchers also graduate at rates almost 60 percent higher than students in selective public high schools, and nearly 80 percent higher than students in regular public schools.

In California, too many of those regular public schools are doing a poor job, despite high spending. More than one in 10 high schools graduating only slightly more than half the students is not an acceptable outcome. These simple reforms would cost little or nothing, but they would help transform dropout rates into graduation realties. For California students and parents, that is a lot better than the status quo.

Vicki E. Murray is a senior fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. This column was originally a Capital Ideas feature distributed by PRI.