The dropout rate is mostly a numbers game | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Politicians who run for office always look for issues they thin will get them votes. I suspect if you could accurately assess it, the high school "dropout" rate might well be one of the top issues non-incumbents have chosen to run "against" over the last half century or so. And incumbent politicians and 'educrats', like Little Jack Horner, like to point to a few points improvement in the "graduation rate" to prove (they think) that they are delivering the goods. It's all a disgusting shell game and means little more than bluster by the politicians and bureaucrats.

    Look at it this way: As a matter of public policy what is an acceptable dropout rate? Think about it. The temptation is for some people, depending on whether you are campaigning on the offensive or on the defensive, to say the dropout rate should be zero. But if we think about it we know that is not realistic.

    Students leave school for a number of reasons. Some move to another school. Some get a job, with many of those returning the next fall or next semester. Some get sick, or pregnant, and can't attend school for an extended period of time. Sadly, some die. Unlike the old days, few join the military, because by and large the military will not take a "dropout." And a few just quit and play video games. And dropping out of school is exactly what they should do if they can't find a job or transfer to another school.

    I say that because my experience as a high school principal convinced me that both the school and the student is better off to leave school than to site in class knowing you can't pass the course(s) for the semester or year and that you're going to have to repeat the year. And as a practical matter it is foolish for the state to have resources wasted trying to make the system accommodate a student who has no motivation to do school work. It is better for the teenager to learn something about the real world and often when they go back to school they're a different person.

    No, the dropout rate will never be zero. As a matter of public policy, and use of scarce resources, we should not seek a zero dropout rate. But how high is too high?

    The liberal response to the "dropout problem" has typically been to try to adapt the system to "meet the needs" of the potential dropout. And that is a prime example of liberal foolishness in education. Literally billions of dollars have been spent from grants to "improve the dropout rate." That's a good thing for politicians because the incumbents can then defend their records by pointing to these innovative programs that are supposed to stop kids from leaving school. Most have never done much more than teach those kids that if you slouch off enough they'll lower the standards and let you slide by.

    But in recent years North Carolina has come up with a much more effective dropout prevention program. It's based on simply manipulating the numbers.

    When I first started teaching they gave each of us a "Register." It was a book that had white sheets in it on which you recorded individual students' information and blue sheets in the back in which you reported the collective individual students' information on a monthly form. This was a big deal. I remember a teacher getting fired because she could not make her white sheets balance to the blue sheets. That is now done with technology, but the coding operates pretty much the same way, and for the same reason.

    The reason it was a big deal was because those blue sheets produced money. Money was allocated on the basis of enrollment. The more students you had the more money the state gave the school system. They computed the allotment of money on the basis of the "best three out of four" ADM. (average daily membership).

    In the earlier days they used ADA (average daily attendance). Then they changed it to ADM because they did not want to penalize schools for student absenteeism. And that was sound, because a school's expenses do not decrease if a student is absent.

    ADM was a factor in an equation that started with every student being enrolled (i.e., a white sheet was crated, now entered into the database) and if the student left school they were taken out of "membership." They remain in the database (as having enrolled) but are deducted from the membership roll. What kept schools from just continuing to count the students in membership, so as to draw down more money, was the fact that another reporting item was ADA (average daily attendance). If a student left school and you continued to carry them in membership you ADA went down. And that was not a good thing.

    Of course it's more complicated than this, but essentially there are two classifications for student who withdraw from a school: Transferred to another school or dropout. In recent years they came up with the brilliant idea that they would compute the numbers differently. They decided that if a student left your school and went to another school that they were not counted against your "graduation rate" (the reciprocal of the dropout rate). That's as it was always done. But the problem came in knowing where a student who left school went. Many just stopped coming to school without formally "withdrawing." If you didn't find out where the student went you were usually instructed to count them as a dropout.

    But schools had no real incentive to spend time finding out where the withdrawn student went, because the ADM went down regardless of whether the student transferred or dropped out.

    Then the politicians got into the game so the schools realized they needed to make "the dropout problem" look better. When politicians started running against incumbents and claiming that 'one out of every three...' students dropout the educrats came up with the bright idea that if they coded those students who had left school differently then things would look better.

    Last week the State Board of Education was told that the dropout rate has declined significantly in North Carolina since 2006. That year 68.3 percent of students graduated within four years of entering high school. Last year, it was reported, 82.5 percent graduated. But the real truth is that probably not many fewer students were sitting at home playing video games. What has actually taken place is that the schools just got better at tracking where the students who left school went. And they found more of them "transferred" to another school than sat home and played video games all day.

    An interesting footnote to all this recordkeeping: The group with the lowest graduation rate is the Hispanic students. The group with the highest graduation rate is the Asian students. There are no doubt several reasons for both of these facts, but it is probably not unreasonable to conclude that more Hispanic students quit coming to school and the schools have a harder time tracking where they went; so this may explain why the Hispanic dropout rate looks higher.

    I'm not suggesting that school officials are doing anything wrong in the numbers game. It is better to track what happened to a student who left school. And if that student enrolls somewhere else it should not count against the school they left.

    But I am suggesting it is disingenuous of politicians to crow about "reducing the dropout rate" when what they have really done is change the way the numbers are manipulated.

    So watch out. In a few years, if they keep the same numbers system, you will see the dropout rate level out, albeit at a lower level. But still some students will be leaving school to watch video games, until their parents/guardian make them get out and find a real job. They'll then learn that they need an education and most will return to a school somewhere. More than likely, they'll return to a school/program that's lowered its standards and will give them a diploma regardless of whether they actually learned what they need to know and be able to do. But the politicians will not care. How productive that teenager is will not be a campaign issue and the waste of human capital will go unnoticed in the public debate.

    But the numbers will look better.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.