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Locating and Preventing the Dropout Crisis

Locating and Preventing the Dropout Crisis. How to Target and Transform High Schools Which Produce The Nation’s Dropouts Robert Balfanz & Nettie Legters Center for Social Organization of Schools Johns Hopkins University Prepared for the National High School Center Summer Institute

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Locating and Preventing the Dropout Crisis

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  1. Locating and Preventing the Dropout Crisis How to Target and Transform High Schools Which Produce The Nation’s Dropouts Robert Balfanz & Nettie Legters Center for Social Organization of Schools Johns Hopkins University Prepared for the National High School Center Summer Institute June 11, 2007

  2. Why Transform Low Performing High Schools?

  3. Dropout Crisis • 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year • 7,000/day, 12 million over the next decade • Half of the nation’s dropouts attended a dropout factory

  4. Where Did All TheFreshmen Go? 12th Graders 197 11th Graders 259 10th Graders 327 9th Graders 484 Number of 9th Graders in 1996/97 = 669 % Fewer 12th graders in 1999/2000 than 9th graders 1996/97 = 71%

  5. How Many Dropout Factories Are There?

  6. Where Are The Nation’s Dropout Factories Located? About Half are Located in Northern, Midwestern and Western Cities The rest are primarily found throughout the South and Southwest

  7. Counties with 1 or more weak promoting power high schools (gray shading) and counties with 5 or more weak promoting power high schools (black shading), 2003-04

  8. Who Attends Dropout Factories? • Students who live in Poverty • Minority Students

  9. Dropout Factories and Minority Concentration

  10. Percent of Minority Students Attending Dropout Factories

  11. Poverty and Dropout Factories

  12. Consequences of Dropping Out • A new high school dropout in 2000 had less than a 50% chance of getting a job • That job earned less than ½ of what the same job earned 20 years ago • Lack of education is ever more strongly correlated with welfare dependency and incarceration • Some U.S. jobs cannot be filled by U.S. trained skilled employees

  13. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

  14. Is It Possible… to create systems of high schools that create success and opportunity for all students, regardless of color, creed, or socio-economic status? to create organizations that are so open, so responsive, so resourced, so skillful, that movement toward that ideal is inevitable?

  15. What Does This SystemLook Like? Essential Elements

  16. The Yoga ofHigh School Reform • High standards AND relevance AND personalization • Organization AND Instruction • Literacy AND Math • New small schools AND Large School Conversions • Prescription AND Participation • The Tortoise AND The Hare

  17. How Do We Create These Systems?

  18. Identify Schools and Students • Implement System of Comprehensive, Targeted, and Intensive Interventions • Models and Evidence • States as Brokers of Diversified Portfolio of High Schools

  19. Challenges Transforming low performing high schools and systems is not easy, fast, or cheap

  20. Not Easy • Need comprehensive and systemic approach to avoid isolated efforts that exacerbate inequity • Consider multiple approaches as appropriate to context • Develop and scale-up technical and human supports for transformation • Align federal, state, district, and school-based efforts

  21. Not Fast “The trick is how to sustain interest in a reform that requires a generation to complete.” Debbie Meyer NCLB & States must acknowledge reality and progress using multiple indicators

  22. Not Cheap • Continue and expand public and private funding • Institutionalize targeted resources • Title I • Perkins • Dedicated Fund for Low Performing High Schools

  23. Benefits > Costs • A recent study finds that our nation can recoup 45 billion dollars in lost tax revenues, health care expenditures, and social service outlays if we cut the number of high school dropouts in half (Levin et. al, 2007).

  24. Coming Soon… • Graduation Promise Act (GPA) • $2.5 Billion High School Reform/Dropout Reduction Bill co-sponsored by Senators Bingaman (D-NM) and Burr (R-NC)

  25. What Would You DoWith $40 Million?

  26. If We Act Now… We Can Transform the Nation’s Dropout Factories and Grad Gap High Schools In So Doing we can Transform the Nation

  27. The Last Slide The Center for Social Organization of Schools Johns Hopkins University 3003 N. Charles St., Ste. 200 Baltimore, MD 21218 410-516-8800 www.csos.jhu.edu

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