Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | The Impact of Data on Education, page 4

Dropouts
Brooklyn Bridge Academy (BBA) is one of 30 transfer schools in New York City’s public school system. Transfer schools are by definition small, they cater to youngsters who have previously dropped out of school or who are older and have a history of school failure and poor attendance. The expansion of the number of these schools, along with broader reforms in the entire high school system, is to a great extent the result of an unusually exhaustive dropout study the city’s department of education conducted.

BBA is located in a circular, third floor wing of South Shore Educational Complex, a sprawling high school with over 1,000 students. As of mid-January 2008, BBA had 144 students, all of them between the ages of 16 and 20. Many of them, although they had been in high school for more than two years, had yet to gain the 11 credits typical of completing freshman year. Some of them had none.

There are certain parameters for each transfer school. In general, they enroll students who have either dropped out or are at least two years behind in their academic work; they work with community-based organizations to provide an extensive array of counseling and support services; they hold to the same standards and offer the same Regents diploma as regular New York City public high schools but organize the curriculum to fit the needs of their students; and many of them also offer connections to the real world through Learning to Work programs.

BBA has joined forces with FEGS Health and Human Services System, a large New York City-based nonprofit. FEGS has seven staff members at BBA and is helping to run the school along with staff from the New York City Department of Education, including Principal Adele Fabrikant, nine teachers and four support staff.

Adele Fabrikant, Principal Brooklyn Bridge Academy

Much of what the school has done so far and much of what it will do in the future is based on combing through vast amounts of detailed data about each of its students. For example, course offerings do not fall into the typical grade-level pattern—9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th —found at most high schools. Instead, the staff carefully examined the courses needed by each of the school’s students and designed the class schedule to meet their needs.

In addition, students attend an advisory session twice a week with someone from the FEGS staff, and every two weeks they receive a progress report assessing their academic progress. If need be, advisors will also meet one-on-one with individual students to help them sort out the myriad nonacademic difficulties that often make school a challenge for at-risk students.

“There is a lot of adult-student contact,” Fabrikant said. “Students will have an adviser, beginning to end, and they will support students and hold them accountable for their decisions.”

In the large-scale dropout study, New York City found that already existing transfer schools had the greatest impact on graduation rates for these highly at-risk students. Their overall graduation rate was 56 percent. For the same category that the study focused on—overage and under-credited students (meaning the students were at least two years behind in terms of age and accumulated credits)—large comprehensive high schools had a graduation rate of 19 percent.

The study was conducted in partnership with the New York City Department of Education by the Boston-based Parthenon Group. Teams from the Department of Education and the Parthenon Group looked at every student who entered high school during the 1999-2000 school year and tracked their progress for seven years through the 2005-2006 school year.

“We had a lot of questions to start off with,” said JoEllen Lynch, CEO of the Partnership Support Office for New York City schools. “How big a factor is literacy? Is numeracy a factor? Is the type of school a factor? Is the size of the school a factor? What happens to the students who fall behind at what year? Do they do better in the new small schools or not?”

What they found was that the sheer number of highly at-risk students was enormous. There were a total of 138,000 young people ages 16-21 who were either already out of school without a diploma or more than two years behind in credits. That number is larger than the entire student population in Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. Of New York City’ s total overage, under-credited population, 68,000 had dropped out.

The study also found that 48 percent of entering freshman ultimately fall behind, and almost all of them, or 93 percent, begin the downward spiral in the 9th and 10th grades; 78 percent were retained as freshman and 15 percent as sophomores; and once they did start to fall behind, they left school at a rapid pace.

A determining factor for the ultimate success—or failure—of at-risk students was a combination of school size and the concentration of low-performing students. A worst case scenario was a school with 1,000 students or more and a high percentage who had not done well on their 8th grade English assessment. In these settings, three-out-of-every-five students fell behind by at least two years. But by making adjustments, the study indicated,
graduation rates would go up.

The data also revealed at least one unexpected surprise—the discovery of nearly 5,000 young people between the ages of 17 and 21 who dropped out even though they were close to achieving the 44 credits and passing the five Regents exams they needed to graduate. In order to make sure that they stay in school and make it through to graduation Lynch is concerned that they be given the kind of support they need. She says, “If we don’t [do] something for them at that point, we’ll lose them. We could see it in the data now. We never could see that before.”

In fact, “seeing it in the data” has been what took the dropout problem in New York City to a whole new level, what allowed school officials to abandon theories and speculation and determine exactly what the problem was so they could put very specific plans in place to address it.

The findings from the Parthenon study have led New York City schools to expand an already existing plan to close some of its large, low-performing, comprehensive high schools and create additional smaller schools designed to meet the needs of at-risk students. The effort began in 2003 and included the creation of 200 new small schools. By fall of 2007, the total had reached 231, including Brooklyn Bridge Academy.

Few school districts, however, have the data systems in place that allow for the kind of analysis done by the Parthenon Group. And even though New York had the data and the commitment and expertise within its leaderships and staff to use data for planning reform, the Department did not have sufficient staff with the analytical expertise to conduct such large-scale analysis. “School districts don’t have these kinds of numbers crunchers,” Lynch said. “It’s a big issue. You don’t have on-staff strategic planning experts to really do this kind of work.” If, however, “we did this across the country,” she said, “we’d finally have a real understanding of how many students we actually lose, where we lose them from and why.”

The New York study is, indeed, an anomaly. “From our point of view, when this was done, frankly it was unprecedented,” said Adam Tucker, a Senior Program Officer with the Gates Foundation, which funded the study. “It had not been done previously, not in the depth and the specificity that New York City was able to do it.”

He applauded not only its analysis of the “dropout pipeline” but also the inclusion of a concrete plan for building schools and programs to better serve those who were at risk of never graduating from high school.

“There have been a variety of dropout studies, but what made this piece of work special and unique,” Tucker said, “was the depth and comprehensiveness of the analysis coupled with the school district having a strategic operating plan to help mitigate the challenge.”

When it comes to education data, both graduation and dropout rates make for the most problematic terrain, which is due in part to the reluctance of school leaders to truly scrutinize their dropout rates. “In many ways, it’s in peoples’ best interest along the food chain not to have good data,” Ross Santy notes, “because you can say, ‘They didn’t drop out, they transferred, and they don’t count against me as a dropout.’”

And it’s also due to the nature of the problem itself. It’s much harder to keep track of students, especially those in highly mobile communities, than it is to measure their test scores, and it’s close to impossible to follow them across state lines. When it comes to dropouts, “what you’re asking schools to do...is to track down the student who isn’t around anymore,” said Chris Swanson, director of the Research Center for Editorial Projects in Education (EPE), which publishes Education Week.

Previously, Swanson was at the Urban Institute, where he conducted numerous studies on graduation rates and ultimately developed his own—one that made people realize that the percentage of students getting a high school diploma was much lower than the 85 percent most often gleaned from U.S. Census data.

Instead, Swanson’s calculations put the number at what is considered to be a much more realistic 70 percent nationwide. Swanson uses the best available national data —the Common Core of Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics— to come up with his rate, but that still falls short of what individual states could do if they wanted to.

Once they had certain things in place, such as an individual student identification code, they could track each student who entered high school to find exactly which ones graduated and which ones did not. They could keep track of these students over time, not just year to year, so that they would know how many entering 9th graders in a given year finished
school four years later.

All 50 states had at one time agreed to do just that. In 2005, they backed a four-year longitudinal graduation rate designed by the National Governors Association (NGA). Since then, policymakers in North Dakota have changed their minds, but all other states are still committed to the NGA rate, which is similar in concept to reporting requirements under NCLB. Federal law, however, allows for substantial leeway, Swanson said, and the result has been a hodgepodge of often misleading graduation rates.

But the outlook is not as grim, he said, as it was in 2004 when graduation rates were “relegated to a dark, dusty corner of the educational statistics enterprise.” That is changing, he explained. “It’s maybe not where we want it to be...but there has been more attention paid, which is certainly good.”

Swanson predicted that within five years or more, nearly all 50 states will be able to come up with a longitudinal graduation rate. A dozen states, he said, have the technical ability to come up with one now; 35 other states have implemented the required tracking system but have not had it in place long enough to come up with longitudinal data.

Next page: The dropout/graduation issue alone provides a good snapshot of current trends in the collection of education data.

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