1 in 4 high-school students here fails to graduate on time

By Jolayne Houtz and Linda Shaw
Seattle Times staff reporters

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More than 300 freshmen took their seats in Renton High School classrooms in fall 1998 to begin their high-school studies.

Four years later, only 145 seniors left with diplomas.

What happened to the other half of the class of 2002 isn't fully known. Some certainly moved or earned a GED instead.

But it's a safe bet that a great many of them simply dropped out.

In the Seattle area, just 73 percent of students in the class of 2002 graduated on time, according to a Seattle Times analysis that's part of the newspaper's 2003 School Guide being released today.

Using a new method developed by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, The Times estimated graduation rates for public high schools in the Seattle area. Renton High showed up at the bottom, with an estimated 50 percent graduating on time. Just across Lake Washington at Mercer Island High, 91 percent graduated with their class — the highest rate in the region.

Statewide, about 66 percent of students graduate on time, according to the Manhattan Institute. That puts Washington 39th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a national study by the institute on the class of 2001.

It's a figure that the state confirmed last week in a new report on dropout prevention — and one that is significantly lower than the graduation rate of 79 percent the state previously reported for 2002. State officials believed the 79 percent figure was inflated because of inaccurate information from school districts.

"They are sobering numbers. Very disturbing in a lot of ways," said Highline Superintendent Joseph McGeehan.

Of particular concern: The Manhattan Institute analysis shows that fewer than half of Latino students in Washington graduate on time. For African-American students, the on-time rate is 53 percent.

That's compared to 70 percent for whites and 77 percent for Asian-American students.

As with test scores, the graduation rates appear to be linked to family income — the poorer the student body, the lower graduation rates tend to be.

Some educators dispute The Times' findings.

Schools such as Renton High, with high rates of student mobility and special-needs students, are penalized by this approach, argues Louis Pappas, executive director of secondary education in Renton. He puts Renton High's rate at about 68 percent. (See accompanying article for more details on this calculation method and its limitations.)

Despite an array of efforts by schools to keep students on course toward their diplomas, it appears the graduation rate hasn't gotten any better over the past 10 years. And the new state study indicates it may be getting worse.

No one knows for certain what the real number is. This basic measure has not been a priority for many educators, and there's been little incentive to get it right — until now.

New federal requirements, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, take graduation rates into account when measuring whether a high school is making adequate progress each year in helping students achieve.

Washington state officials have set a goal to meet the new federal law: 85 percent of high-school students will graduate on time by 2014.

Most schools have a long way to go. In The Times' analysis, only seven high schools in the Seattle area meet the 85 percent goal today.

How it works

The Manhattan Institute, which developed the method used by The Times, is a New York-based think tank whose research has been used to support school choice and vouchers.

The method works like this: Look at how many students enter a high school as freshmen, then compare that number with how many students receive regular diplomas from the school four years later, taking into account changes in school population.

The institute's work is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which says low graduation rates are one reason it has made millions of dollars in grants to help overhaul the nation's high schools.

The Times adapted this method to use for individual high schools but did not calculate rates by race because, in most cases, the number of students in each racial group is too small for those figures to be fair or accurate.

The graduation figures are estimates and should be treated with caution. Jay Greene, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said he believes the institute's method produces reasonable estimates for schools but works best to examine larger groups of students and could be affected by high rates of population change.

For that reason, The Times eliminated from its analysis 13 of the Seattle area's 68 public high schools that are very small or that had experienced dramatic changes in student population.

Although not definitive, the numbers raise reasonable questions: Why did Mountlake Terrace, for example, give out only 320 diplomas in spring 2002 when, four years earlier, about 568 students entered the school as freshmen?

It would be wrong to assume that all of the missing students are dropouts. But experts say it's not unreasonable to assume that a large number of them are dropouts.

The discouragement factor

Students don't graduate on time for many reasons, some of which have little to do with their schools.

They have trouble at home, or trouble with alcohol and drugs. They have learning difficulties, get pregnant or have to earn money to help their families.

Jeremy Finley, 17, who dropped out at age 13, is not unusual. He ran away from home, got in trouble with the law and was drawn to street life. And school didn't help, he said. It was frustrating, didn't seem useful, and he was embarrassed when he fell behind.

He figured he was smart enough to survive on the street.

"But to tell the truth, I wasn't," he says. He's now working with a case manager at Yo! Seattle, an organization that works with dropouts, and is looking for a job.

Those who work with dropouts agree that school policies and attitudes are part of the problem.

In King County, the juvenile court interviewed 3,000 students with attendance problems and asked them to chose from 28 reasons that they skipped school.

"They all told us, without a doubt, that their number-one reason why they skipped school was that they were discouraged about being behind," said Kaki Dimock, the court's at-risk youth programs manager.

In its report released last week, the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) reviewed national research and concluded that schools can make changes to reduce the dropout rate.

"There are a lot of places that don't seem to want to keep kids in school if they want to leave, especially if they are disruptive," said Pete Bylsma, director of research and evaluation for OSPI and co-author of the new report.

Many people blame the students, he said, but "I think the evidence is that the school system plays some role in creating an environment that may be conducive to letting students drop out."

Many students eventually get a degree of some sort, through a General Educational Development (GED) credential or vocational program, for example. By age 24, 86 percent of Americans have at least a high-school diploma or the equivalent, according to the National Research Council.

But that's at a higher cost to everyone than if they'd completed school on time in the first place.

Schools making an effort

It's not that schools aren't trying. Districts use all kinds of methods to keep kids on track: alternative and vocational programs, tutoring and counseling, summer school and much more.

Dutch Day, a social-studies and language-arts teacher at Renton High, ticks off a dozen efforts his school has tried in the past decade: fine-tuning the curriculum, the schedule, the requirements, the ways of communicating with students and parents.

Some Renton students even get automatic wake-up calls from the schools so they'll make it on time.

"It's a certain act of faith that if you keep at it, you'll have an effect," Day said.

Renton is well-regarded for its efforts to keep students in class using the Becca law, which requires districts to take to court students who fail to attend school. Other districts also make good use of the law.

Seattle employs eight specialists who work full-time to reduce truancy, and another 20 focused on drug and alcohol issues — although budget cuts led to 2.5 fewer truancy specialists this year.

A number of high schools also are breaking themselves up into smaller schools-within-schools as a way to personalize education.

That's one of the changes under way at Mountlake Terrace in the Edmonds School District, which opened five academies on its campus this fall, and at Tyee High School in SeaTac. At Tyee, about one-third of the ninth-graders stay with a small group of teachers for most of the day.

Their progress is closely monitored, and they meet with teachers if they start to fall behind. Even though the pilot program started only this autumn, teachers say three-quarters of the students passed all their fall classes, compared with two-thirds of the rest of the school's freshmen.

Graduation rate dropping?

In spite of all that's being done, Washington's on-time graduation rate of about 66 percent appears to have dropped 11 percentage points between 1990 and 2001, according to the new OSPI dropout report.

Many are concerned that as graduation requirements rise, students will get discouraged, fall behind and leave in even greater numbers. Many worry what will happen when, starting with the class of 2008, students must pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to get a diploma.

"When students realize they're not going to make it, they opt out of school," said Judy Opheim, a truancy specialist in two Seattle high schools.

Others worry that schools will be tempted to manipulate the numbers to make themselves look better, as recently reported in Houston.

Yet some believe the goal of reaching every student — a hallmark of the national push to improve student achievement — will help more stay in school.

It's in everyone's interest to see more students succeed — if only because of what failure costs all taxpayers. The unemployment rate for dropouts in 1998 was 75 percent higher than for high-school graduates, and the earnings for dropouts who find work are markedly lower than for grads, according to studies cited in the OSPI report.

"You can look the other way. But if you look the other way, you're going to pay later," said Bonnie Glenn, a deputy prosecuting attorney in the King County Prosecutor's Office who focuses on truancy law. She notes that 75 percent of prisoners are high-school dropouts.

There are no simple solutions.

Opheim, the Seattle truancy specialist, has spent nearly a decade working to keep students in school.

It's painstaking work: checking on students to make sure they're in class, holding parent conferences and making home visits. In the last four years at Ingraham High, she's helped reduce the truancy rate to 13 percent from 17 percent.

Budget cuts this year forced Opheim to split her time between Ingraham and Rainier Beach high schools.

So she has stopped doing as many home visits and no longer arrives on students' doorsteps in the morning to bring them to school. She drops in on classrooms to check up on students far less often.

"They need more of me than I have right now," she said.

Times database specialist Justin Mayo contributed to this story.

Jolayne Houtz: 464-3122 or jhoutz@seattletimes.com

Linda Shaw: 464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company