Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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In Dayton, whites lag in graduation rate
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
DAYTON — Like the rest of Ohio, Dayton has a huge gap between the graduation rate of black and white kids.
But here, it’s the white kids who lag behind.
Last week, Education Week magazine published a report that showed Ohio had one of the nation’s worst graduation rate gaps: 80.5 percent of white students graduated compared with 50.7 percent for black students.
But in Dayton, those numbers are nearly reversed. On last year’s state report card, 76.3 percent of the district’s black students graduated, compared with 51.1 percent for white students. And white kids graduated less often here despite outscoring their black classmates on all 21 state achievement tests last year.
“We’ve recognized for some time that we have some issues with high school kids,� school board member Mario Gallin said. “I don’t think we’ve had a specific conversation on this discrepancy, but we are certainly aware there are racial gaps.�
Dayton’s numbers result partly from the size of the district’s black enrollment: Just 21 percent of high school students are white.
But most white students also attend just two schools, and one of those schools — Stivers School for the Arts — is one of the Miami Valley’s highest rated high schools. That helps account for the high test scores for white students.
Of about 1,200 white high school students, 30 percent attend Stivers, where students must audition and show artistic talent to be admitted. Both black and white Stivers students score well on tests and graduate at high rates, which helped 95.5 percent of white students graduate from the school on last year’s report card.
That high-scoring group of white students may be helping to drive up white test scores for the district.
The low graduation rate is another story. Almost half of all white high school students in the district attend Belmont High School, an open-enrollment school that last year was rated in “academic emergency� for low test performance.
At Belmont, 58 percent of the kids are white, and 64 percent of white students graduate. At Meadowdale, the white graduation rate was 54 percent. It was just 23 percent at Colonel White, while at Dunbar — which had 18 white students — the white graduation rate was not reported.
In some ways, there’s never been more attention on keeping kids from quitting school in Dayton.
Over the past five years, the number of Dayton charter schools that target dropouts has grown to 11 and the school board has put in place almost a half-dozen programs designed to make high school a more attractive place.
And school officials say the problem is not specific to any racial group, even if the district’s numbers show far fewer white students graduate than black students.
“Among lower-income family groups, there’s a sense of malaise — a feeling that nothing we do is going to make a difference,� Dayton school board member Mario Gallin said. “I notice with some of the younger kids they have no vision of what they are going to do when they grow up or what the world is like outside their neighborhood.�
Dayton’s overall graduation rate has been on the rise — it’s expected to reach 73 percent on this year’s state report card, due out in August, up from 53 percent two years ago.
And school officials say they are closing the gap between black and white kids when it comes to graduating from high school — two years ago, just 34.7 percent of white students graduated, but Dayton expects its upcoming report card to show 60 percent of white kids earned diplomas.
The district has made gains by focusing new resources toward preventing dropouts. Its “credit recovery� program, for instance, now allows kids to make up classes they failed through online courses before and after school.
This fall, Dayton also will launch an alternative technology high school, partly in hopes of serving kids who don’t do well in traditional schools.
These programs are designed to complement other high school improvements, such as the Dayton Early College Academy on the University of Dayton campus and the academic magnet program at Colonel White High School — two programs designed for kids with high potential.
This year, the district also will begin work on its new career technical high school on the campus of Sinclair Community College.
Board member Clayton Luckie said these alternatives help kids with special challenges.
“It’s unbelievable, for one thing, how many hours some of our kids work,� he said. “A lot of our seniors help support their families. You have to find ways to get kids engaged in the educational process.�
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