“But we don’t have the staff, right?” Rakauskas adds. “We’re all working in a frenzy.”
Last year, Cleveland, a heavily Latino school in a sometimes-rough area, was assigned one of the district’s special dropout counselors. She was extremely helpful, but near the end of the year, she was assigned elsewhere, because Cleveland’s dropout rate was deemed “too low.” A later bulletin indicated that Cleveland’s rate had doubled, leaving the high school’s administrators baffled — but perhaps not shocked, in a school district that for months could not fix its own teacher-payroll fiasco.
Illustration by Fred Noland
“We’re trying to get answers about what look to be contradictory statements,” Rakauskas says.
Even the raw dropout numbers can be inaccurate, misleading and in some cases deliberately skewed, depending on how they are tabulated and how long a student must be missing from class to be considered a dropout.
Joe Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc., a Los Angeles–based think tank, says school leaders in years past underreported LAUSD’s dropout rates — a fact that a Harvard University study unveiled and the district now acknowledges. “They’ve always been downplayed and made to seem less,” Hicks says, because average daily attendance is used to determine the state funding of local districts. “There is a lot of money at stake, which drives the desire to plump up the figures.”
The big, upward tick in the number of kids disappearing from their schools may in part reflect more accurate reporting, but Hicks sees a host of factors: the selfish interests of politicians and teachers unions, parent apathy, fear among teenagers about gang retribution and violence, language barriers, and the bloated LAUSD bureaucracy and school board.
“We’ve got a whole building full of edu-crats, who really provide little in the way of real worth to the schools,” Hicks says. “That needs to be rooted out.”
He cautions, though, that not all of the fault is the district’s, Villaraigosa’s or teachers’. “There’s some blame to be borne by parents. ... You can’t expect school districts to do what parents aren’t doing at home — turning off the TV and making sure [students] are doing their homework, exposing them to books, and getting them to libraries to check out books.
“What have the parents done wrong? What have communities done wrong? What’s the totality of the picture that’s causing a kid, at 13, 14 or 15, to say, ‘I don’t need to stay in school’”
The truth is, none of the adults from LAUSD or the Partnership have that answer. Alvaro Alvarenga of the district’s Parent Community Services Branch tries to educate families about the importance of gaining a high school diploma. Her advice is almost painfully practical. “When I was a teacher, I recommended finding a time and a quiet place to do homework, and then a time for TV. When you have five or six people living in a one-bedroom apartment, there is no quiet place to do homework.”
Yet parent Rosalia Olaya, who attended Fairfax High School and has sent her three children to LAUSD schools, says something deeper is driving young teens away from school. “It seems like this generation of kids are apathetic,” she says. “ I don’t think they have that much desire [for success].”
Back in the cavernous and luxurious new auditorium at Central Los Angeles High School No. 9, the dropout summit continues with a slide show and speeches. Villaraigosa goes out of his way to praise School Board president Monica Garcia and board member Yolie Flores Aguilar, two of his staunch political allies, under whose watch the dropout rate has increased. About two dozen teenage students, dressed in bright-yellow T-shirts, fill a section of seats on a morning when they would otherwise be in class. “Inside every student is a graduate,” the shirts proclaim.
The dropout summit is, by itself, a great educational experience for students who are missing several hours of class, says dropout czar Duardo — the kind of claim made continually over the years by bureaucrats in a district where high school kids watch lots of films, go on field trips, and still can’t multiply fractions.
Finally, the session breaks up into small “think tanks,” where students have a chance, alongside teachers and parents, to voice their ideas for solving the dropout crisis.
One of their main proposals, Duardo says later, is that the kids want to sleep in. “One of the things they said is that [classes start] too early. They’re not awake. If you look at the research on brain development, that’s not their functional time.”
Good to know — another fact for the district and Villaraigosa to address in their strangely parallel, Rube Goldberg–esque attempts to sift through priorities. “Kids are saying we shouldn’t start school until 10 o’clock,” Duardo offers. “I think it’s definitely something the district could look into — possibly make it an option. Give them more flexibility.”
