Our view: Can’t throw up our hands as teens quit

Over the next two weeks, an estimated 90,000 seniors earning high school diplomas across Georgia will mark the milestone by tossing their graduation caps into the air. Proud parents and grandparents will stand on chairs and dash to the aisles with cameras to capture that long-awaited moment.

But missing from those graduation photos will be about 49,000 members of the class of 2009 who have already tossed something of great value into the air — their futures.

That’s the number of Georgia students who began high school four years ago but have since disappeared from the radar of both the state and the schools. No one knows where all those missing students have gone, or what they are doing.

Most are likely dropouts, sitting on the living room couch, watching “Simpsons” reruns and waiting for a job to magically land in their lap. Even if those teens somehow find a job, they will never earn enough to support a family in a middle-class lifestyle; the average American without a high school diploma earns an annual salary of less than $20,000.

“When I graduated from high school, you could earn a decent wage to support your family working in the mines in West Virginia,” says former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, now president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. “When I was governor, I visited one of the mines and found almost all miners had at least an associate’s degree. When asked why, the miner owner replied, ‘I am not letting anyone work a mile underground with a half-million-dollar piece of technical equipment who doesn’t at least have a postsecondary education.’ “

Yet every year, tens of thousands of Georgia teens try to enter the work force without a high school education.

According to some, we’re making progress in bringing down that number. The state Department of Education, for example, claims that Georgia’s high school graduation rate last year was 75.4 percent, the highest level in the state’s history.

“In 2008, we had more than 83,000 students who graduated on time, which is 27,000 more than we had just five years ago,” said state Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox.

Unfortunately, the methodology used to produce the graduation rate cited by Cox is flawed. Because it tends to undercount dropouts or rely on sketchy dropout data, it produces an inflated rate of success. Those falsely optimistic numbers in turn prevent the public from knowing the extent of the dropout problem and taking the necessary steps to combat it.

A new federal policy will help the state and the public get a better idea of what is happening to those students. In the next three years, all states must move to a “four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate.” The standard methodology takes the number of students who graduate in four years with a regular high school diploma, and divides it by the number of students who entered high school four years earlier, adjusting for transfers in and out, émigrés and deceased students.

Before a student can be eliminated from a school’s roll, the school must provide written confirmation that the student has enrolled in another school or in an educational program that culminates in a regular high school diploma.

In the absence of such accountability, local schools can continue to disguise their failures by claiming that students who have left school have simply moved. That is a particularly unconvincing explanation here in Georgia, where the population has grown steadily. Between 2000 and 2008, for example, the Atlanta metro region added 1.13 million people. Last year, Fulton County became the first county in Georgia to tip past the 1-million-persons mark. Yet the Fulton class of 2009 has 1,535 fewer students than it began with four years ago — 7,087 began ninth-grade in Fulton schools in 2005; 5,552 will graduate this year. It’s not alone.

Four years ago, Cobb County boasted a freshmen class of 9,580 students. Its senior class has 7,180 students. Gwinnett reported 12,724 freshmen in its class of 2009; it now lists 9,356 seniors. DeKalb’s class of 2009 began with 9,473 and is down to 6,140.

A 2008 report by Editorial Projects in Education, a nonprofit that publishes Education Week, concluded that 58.1 percent of students in Georgia earned a diploma in four years, compared with a national average of 70.6 percent. In that analysis, based on 2005 data, only four states and the District of Columbia performed worse.

Using the standard national methodology, Georgia’s class of 2008 began with 142,079 freshmen. In the course of four years, the class shrunk by 59,000 students. That would suggest a graduation rate of 58 percent rather than the state rate of 75.4 percent.

To its credit, the state DOE doesn’t pretend its graduation rate is accurate or cause for celebration.

“We recognize no matter how you calculate Georgia’s graduation rate, it is too low,” says DOE spokesman Dana Tofig.

Beyond getting a better grasp of the number of dropouts, the state also has to get a better idea of why teens leave school. Of special concern are black and Hispanic males, who have a graduation rate in Georgia of under 40 percent, according to Editorial Projects in Education.

The state’s current strategy is to attack the problem in high school with graduation coaches who spur lagging students on toward diplomas. But emerging research suggests that the battle lines have to be drawn long before high school and even before middle school. Many researchers contend the erosion of children’s educational ambitions begins in elementary school when they fall behind in reading.

“Without question, low-level literacy skills are contributing factors to many students’ decisions to drop out of school,” says Alfred W. Tatum, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Reading Clinic and author of “Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap.”

“Not knowing how to read or read well is painful for many adolescents,” says Tatum. “Large numbers of adolescents opt to surrender their life’s chances before they get to know their life’s choices.”

But it isn’t just poor readers who give up on school. “Adolescents with adequate literacy skills — that is, the ability to handle the academic demands of schools — choose to drop out, although in fewer numbers, because they are grossly disengaged by age-old traditions of curriculum or assessment overload,” says Tatum. “Adolescents routinely encounter literary and non-literary texts across disciplines that they view as devoid of meaning and significance.”

A new report by the Southern Regional Education Board — a 16-state compact dedicated to improving education — cites reading deficiencies as the most urgent problem facing schools. The report contends that schools stop teaching reading after the elementary grades even though struggling readers still need help in the middle grades and high school. The SREB report urges a new commitment to teaching reading skills to adolescents by embedding reading instruction in middle and high school subject classes.

If Georgia wants more teens in those exuberant photos of graduation caps in flight, it first has to get a better picture of which students are dropping out and why.

Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)