Saturday, Jul. 19, 2008

Our View: Ignore stats; cut dropouts

The irony is that education officials know what works to keep students interested.

Summer is the season for sporting diversions, and the state's educational researchers are caught up in the fever.

Welcome to the tournament of dropout statisticians. In this spectacle of intellectual gladiators, there's the University of California, Berkeley battling Harvard University while Johns Hopkins University challenges the state Department of Education. On your mark, get set, tabulate!

Let's cut this match short. The educators want to make this about who has the best dropout statistics. Of course, they do. They don't want to talk about the abysmal failure of the public schools to educate children before they become so bored they drop out.

The dropout rates are miserable, yet the educators don't pursue long-term solutions. They want to change the conversation to anything but fixing the problem.

The latest numbers from the state put the Merced County's dropout rate at 22 percent. That means almost one in every four students will not finish high school. That's seven in a class of 30.

But the numbers range greatly among the county's school districts:

Delhi Unified at 27.3 percent is the worst, followed by Hilmar Unified at 20.7; Los Banos Unified at 18 percent; Gustine Unified at 15.5 percent; Merced Union at 15 percent, La Grand Union at 10.9 percent; and Dos Palos-Oro Loma Joint Unified at 10.8 percent.

We don't dismiss the importance of compiling accurate statistics -- the implementation of student identification numbers is an improvement, though all admit the computations still are imperfect.

It's just that we already knew the answer before the results came out. It's bad.

We see it in the gang, drug and crime problems. Employers report that they cannot get high school graduates to fill their jobs. Some companies from outside the area are not relocating here because they fear too few educated people are here to fill well-paying positions.

The high rates of unemployment tell us people are unqualified for the work force. Multigenerational poverty is evidence that children from poor families are not being inspired in their classrooms to break that spirit-sapping cycle. The achievement gap between ethnic groups remains profound.

The irony is that education officials know what works. There are pockets of excellence in the Valley that can compete with any public school in the nation.

Valley schools would rather cite a long list of pathologies to excuse poor performance. But we cannot and should not accept any of them, because we can see what incredible work they can do when they really want to.

What do we have to gain? A lot. Just increasing the graduation rate by 10 percentage points would lower homicide and assault rates by 20 percent, and prevent 64 murders and more than 3,300 aggravated assaults each year in the Valley, according to the coalition "Fight Crime: Invest in Kids."

The California Dropout Research Project says dropouts earn less pay, pay fewer taxes and are more likely to be on public assistance than those who have high school diplomas. California suffers billions in economic losses from the dropout problem.

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