Broad-Based Efforts Keep Students in School

THE STAR’S VIEW: Dropout rates are going down here and around the state – the result of renewed commitments at all levels to educate students.

Just a few years after Arizona recorded a shocking dropout rate of 21 percent, the number of students leaving high school is going down – a bit of good news in a state where the education headlines are often bad.

Tucson Unified School District is among the districts leading the way, recording numbers better than those statewide. Southern Arizona’s largest school district has accomplished this, in part, by allowing administrators the freedom to find methods that work best for their students.

TUSD’s class of 2000 recorded a 23 percent dropout rate over a four-year period, the Star’s Daniel Scarpinato reported Monday. In 2003, the number had declined to 14 percent – below the statewide average.

Several factors contributed to the local and statewide declines, including a change in accounting methods. One change was a switch by the state to measure progress using the number of graduates rather than the number of dropouts. The change is an educational fine point, but it has value in consistency. Comparisons are more accurate when schools and districts throughout the state use the same methods to calculate graduates and dropouts.

Another change is the state’s intensified efforts to track students. The tracking system is helpful in identifying whether students have actually dropped out or whether they just changed schools.

State and national reform measures also have played a role in the improvements. Public schools have been evolving over the past several years, largely due to the demands of the state’s high- stakes AIMS test and President Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative.

Sweeping school-reform demands have focused attention and standards around public education, making possible the realization of shared goals, such as the decrease in dropout rates.

Other local successes can be attributed to the Isolated Classroom Experience, or ICE, a school-based in-house suspension program that has limited the numbers of dropouts at Sahuaro High School.

The program illustrates the kind of innovative efforts public schools are finding useful in keeping at-risk students in the classroom.

In the ICE program, students in trouble aren’t suspended and sent home to be forgotten by the system. They are sent to a counselor, who makes sure the student wants to stay in school. The counselor provides the kind of help necessary to ensure the student does not fall through the educational cracks. With a dropout rate below 1 percent schoolwide, the Sahuaro program is by any measure a success.

Rincon High School, where the dropout rate hovers at about 2 percent, uses a similar in-house suspension program. But it also reaches into the middle schools for a sort of orientation program for incoming freshmen. It’s has proved so successful that it is a model for other TUSD schools.

In both cases, policymakers allow administrators the freedom to shape programs around the needs of their students. As there is no single reason a student strays from school, there should be no one method to try to keep students in school.

What seems so simple in theory – lowering dropout rates – is in reality a monumental task involving hundreds of thousands of students in the state’s biggest bureaucracy. Releasing school officials to do what they do best is proving to be measurably successful.

– M.H.