dropout data

Job prospects for high school dropouts have gotten a lot more grim these past few years.

About 1,500 students dropped out of school in Delaware last school year, and officials are struggling to pinpoint why.

The Delaware Department of Education does show a decreasing dropout rate, with 71 fewer students dropping out last year than the year before. That continues a three-year decline to 3.7 percent, according to an article on DFMNews.

Having more students stay engaged is encouraging, but administrators believe the numbers could be better — after all, they argue, some of their students are being counted as dropouts even though they are continuing their education.

“I’m asking for the opportunity to think outside of the box,” said Mervin Daugherty, superintendent of Red Clay Consolidated School District. Teachers may be more comfortable suggesting alternate educational routes if those students weren’t counted as dropouts.

Washington County Public Schools presented some dismaying news last week.

The Hagerstown, Md., school district’s dropout rate has increased for the past two years. In the 2009-10 year, the rate was 1.56 percent. That inched up to 1.80 in 2010-11 and then hitting 1.93 percent last school year, according to The Herald Mail.

It should be noted these numbers are down from the 5.5 percent rate in 2000, but seeing an increase in the dropout rate — even a small one — can be discouraging.

Donna Hanlin, assistant superintendent for curriculum, school administration and improvement, said part of the reason for the increase in dropouts was because of a more transient school population.

Research has shown that a transient student population does have negative impacts on student achievement  and the classroom environment.

District officials said they are considering an alternate high school to help these students earn their diplomas.

In this post, our first installment of a weekly feature called Research Wednesday, we’d like to share with you a study that shows that programs intended to help transient students only succeed when they address the underlying issues students are facing.

We’re big fans of Claudio Sanchez. Few journalists in the United States have both the depth of experience and the passion that he brings to covering education issues for National Public Radio.

Off-track for graduation after failing a world history course, Kareem Bennett was on his way to being a statistic.

Higher Education, meet Moneyball.

Moneyball, this is Higher Education.

In the movie, Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane reinvents his struggling baseball team by analyzing statistics in new ways to predict player success. In education, college managers are doing something similar to forecast student success — in admissions, advising, teaching, and more.

I've never met anyone who doesn't agree that even one dropout is too many.

So I think we can all agree that this argument shouldn't be about numbers.

Still, I must admit that the "return on investment" figures in a new report by the non-profit Alternative Schools Network are extremely compelling.

The report is nothing revolutionary — it simply builds on earlier efforts at quantifying the dropout epidemic's cost to our society. But the figure from the Northeastern University research team, led by economist Andrew Sum, has the potential to be a strong weapon in the fight to make this conflict more understandable to more people.

The U.S. Department of Education has announced that starting this summer it will be reporting and collecting graduation rate data on a rigorous, uniform basis. States will no longer have differing ways to calculate graduation data in an effort for greater uniformity and transparency in those calculations.

  Nine in 10 students who drop out of high school couldn’t read in the third grade.

  Does the solution to America’s dropout epidemic seem obvious all of the sudden?

  The Inglewood Unified School District had a problem. 

  More than a quarter of the Southern California school district’s high school students had dropped out, according to district records.