New Report: High Schools Producing the Most Drop Outs

Posted by on July 9, 2004

[posted from Public Education Network newsblast]

Graduation is hardly a given for freshmen in 2,000 of America’s public high schools, according to a new study by researchers at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at The Johns Hopkins University. Using data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, researchers Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters measured the “promoting power” of 10,000 regular and vocational high schools that enroll more than 300 students. They compared the number of freshmen in each school to the number of seniors there four years later. The results gathered in their report, “Locating the Dropout Crisis,” are troubling. They indicate that the dropout crisis is fueled by the 20 percent of high schools in which graduation is not the norm. These schools have “weak promoting power,” or 40 percent or fewer seniors than the number of freshmen they enrolled four years earlier. Nearly half of the country’s African American students and two out of five Latino students attend one of these “dropout factories,” compared with just 11 percent of America’s white students, the researchers said. The study found that the high schools producing the largest number of dropouts are concentrated in 50 large and medium-sized cites and 10 southern and southwestern states. The study presents tables showing the number and concentration of high schools with weak promoting power by state (broken down by locale and minority concentration) and for the nation’s 100 largest cities.

http://www.csos.jhu.edu/tdhs/rsch/Locating_Dropouts.pdf