Some L.A. district officials acknowledge, off the record, that the dropout rate is misleading if not outright fraudulent. In 1999, district researchers did their own analysis of the percentage of students who completed high school in four years. Students reported as transfers were not counted (which improved schools' percentages): 52.6 percent of Manual Arts students failed to graduate on time. During that same year, Manual Arts claimed that only three students of nearly 4,000 (less than 0.1 percent) had dropped out.
Regardless of accounting procedures, schools remain responsible both for teaching students and for recognizing students in trouble and helping them, insisted Assistant Superintendent Wong. And no one at Manual Arts would take issue with that.
"We try to keep track of our no-shows, because you want to know where those kids are. We have a responsibility," said counselor Noorani. "We want to get everyone to be tracking where did this kid go, because we don't want to generate a dropout . . . and we also want to provide a service." Noorani pointed out that a number of district programs aim at helping troubled or unsuccessful students, and she commented that it's not fair to make Manual Arts responsible for all the students who don't make it, when she and others are trying so hard to help.
And Manual Arts is still trying. Current principal Ed Robillard has overseen the installation of new iron fencing that is too strong for students to cut through or pull apart, a project that began under Greer. And students outside of class are supposed to display oversize, brightly colored laminated passes, so staffers can immediately spot who's ditching.
Manual Arts sits at the back end of a systemic failure, one that reaches back into how well students are prepared for entering high schools and that takes in the pressures of gangs, poverty and family dissolution. But at the very least, schools have a duty to acknowledge honestly what is happening to students.
The state of California is a co-conspirator in any number of ways. For one thing, California has yet to fully fund a statewide computerized system that could track the fate of individual students. Nor have school districts been mandated to take part. A bill now in the Legislature, sponsored by state Senator Dede Alpert (DÂSan Diego), would require districts to get on board with this student-information system. Reforms at the federal level are also pushing this change.
In addition, the state should count as a dropout every student who leaves traditional school, except in limited cases. At the same time, a new category should give school districts credit for recovered dropouts -- those students who come back to earn a degree. Either that or do away with dropout rates entirely, and replace them with graduation rates measuring how many students get their diplomas on schedule.
"If you're a very knowledgeable administrator who understands these numbers, it is very easy to assemble a zero-percent dropout rate," said one senior district official, who requested anonymity. "It's about gaming it. You could have a whole district showing a zero-percent dropout rate."
Concealing a problem too often becomes tantamount to ignoring it. Let's say, by way of comparison, that city officials decided to undercount the poor and unemployed and then claimed that the city had no poverty, even if it did. And that it was even okay for the city to say it once had this problem, but poverty had been spectacularly erased. If a city could get away with this, would its leaders actually devote the proper time and resources to address poverty? And if it did, on what information would this effort be based or assessed, if the data had all the reliability of snake oil?
