Heritage High School Officials Dispute Study Claim

By Annie McCallum, The News & Advance, Lynchburg, Va.

Oct. 31–Taking aim at a study released this week critical of Heritage High School’s student retention rate, Lynchburg City School officials on Tuesday cited several areas where they said the data used in the report was flawed or incomplete.

The analysis, conducted for The Associated Press by Johns Hopkins University and based on an analysis of federal Education Department data, was released Monday and scrutinized by Lynchburg City Schools officials after it named Heritage High School a “dropout factory.” The term refers to high schools with retention rates — percentage of students who move from their freshman to senior year — of 60 percent or less.

The report said about 1,200 regular or vocational high schools nationwide, about 12 percent, fit that description. It named Heritage as one of 22 high schools in Virginia and the only one in Central Virginia.

In a news release issued Tuesday afternoon and at a previously scheduled joint meeting Tuesday evening with members of the Lynchburg City School Board and City Council, school administrators defended the school’s performance.

The report looked at federal data over three years, tracking students who were enrolled in ninth grade in 2001, 2002 and 2003 and comparing those numbers with the number of seniors in corresponding classes three years later — in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Researchers tracked data for three years in a row to make sure local events like plant closures weren’t to blame for low retention rates.

“It’s a complicated subject and there are very many ways it can be discussed,” said Julie Doyle, school board chairwoman, about graduation rates.

The rates were named a priority during the annual school board retreat last month, but had more immediacy following the study.

Superintendent Paul McKendrick said the school system did not speak with a Johns Hopkins researcher, but talked on Tuesday to a statistician at the National Bureau of Statistics. McKendrick said the Bureau is where the data used in the study originated.

“This study just looks at numbers,” McKendrick said, adding it did not take into account such elements as the “ninth-grade bubble” — a description for those students who don’t pass certain core subjects and therefore still are counted as ninth-graders.

“We continue to classify students as ninth-graders even if it’s their second or third year in high school,” Doyle said.

A skewed number of ninth-grade students can be misleading, but the Johns Hopkins report cautioned many students inside the bubble do drop out.

Being counted as a ninth-grade student over and over again, officials agreed, is difficult on students.

“It could lead to a dropout,” board member Leslie Faircloth said.

The policy is something that will be changed in the future so a student’s classification is reflective of how long they’ve been in school, officials said at the meeting.

Heritage High School, along with E.C. Glass, did meet graduation standards for 2006-07 under No Child Left Behind, the federal accountability measure. Under the measure schools must pass certain benchmarks, one being a graduation rate of at least 61 percent.

Adding to the confusion, school administrators said, is flawed data that the school system had submitted that labeled transfer students as dropouts. That data left E.C. Glass initially graded as failing to meet one of the benchmarks in the No Child Left Behind Act. While the school system successfully appealed that finding, it said the flawed data is again a factor in this most-recent report.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

At-Large Council Member Ceasor Johnson also noted that Heritage High School, and E.C. Glass, ranked in the top 1,000 U.S. high schools by Newsweek for the third consecutive year.

“When you’ve got two schools that are top in the nation, why are you chasing numbers?” Johnson asked. “You can get numbers to say anything you want to.”

School board member Sterling Wilder agreed.

“We can stand here all day and get numbers to do what we want to do,” Wilder said. “I think we need to concentrate more on what we’re doing in the schools for our children.”

Wilder said officials cannot lose focus on what’s important — students. The real question, he said, is how to get our students to learn.

The school system has initiated a new attendance policy this year, which officials say is tougher. It is aimed at getting and keeping students in school. There is also continued focus on enhancing alternative education programs so students who aren’t functioning in a typical learning environment have an alternative and don’t see dropping out as the only option.

When discussing the school system’s enrollment numbers, which are down after initial September counts, numbers were also the focus of frustration.

“We can spend so much time tracking numbers and at some point we have to stop,” Wilder said. “We need to say, ‘how are we going to help our public schoolchildren?’” Said school board member Darin Gerdes: “It’s great to say we want to help out public schoolchildren, but we need to know who to help.”

The bottom line for officials, though, wasn’t the numbers but what to do about them.

“What is our destination with the numbers?” Johnson asked.

He added he wanted to see a joint effort between the school board and City Council to make resources available so no one is dropping out. Johnson said the city needs to be ready to devote money and resources to finding at-risk students and preventing them from dropping out.

“Lets find every last one of them,” he said.

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