Report: 1 in 4 California students drop out before graduating

Nearly 1 in 4 of California’s 6.3 million students drop out of school, according to new data released by the state Department of Education today.

For the 2006-2007 school year, 67.6 percent of the state’s eligible students graduated and 24.2 percent dropped out. The other 8.2 percent of students – such as those who failed to complete high school but earned a GED – fall into a third category known as “completers.”

“24.2 percent is not OK. 24.2 percent is unacceptable to me,” said state schools chief Jack O’Connell in a teleconference. “It represents a tremendous loss of potential.”

For years, the extent of California’s dropout crisis has been a bit of a guessing game because there was no way to accurately determine if a student had dropped out or simply moved and transferred to a different school. Critics charged that schools routinely underestimated their dropout figures.

Now, each California student has a nine-digit “student identifier” that makes tracking them from school to school much easier – and makes it far harder for school districts to fudge their numbers.

The statistics are certain to renew calls for additional state funding for schools. The details also plainly reveal how vast and entrenched the achievement gap – the academic chasm that separates black and Latino students from their white and Asian peers – is in schools across the Golden State.

For black students, the dropout rate is a sobering 41.6 percent. Latinos, who make up nearly half of California’s public school students and are the fastest-growing demographic, have a dropout rate of 30.3 percent. White students have a 15.2 percent dropout rate, while Asians have a 10.2 percent rate.

Because the data released today is the first using the new computerized tracking system, there’s no way to compare it with previous years.

While dropouts are often thought to afflict large urban school districts, the crisis touches every corner of the state.

In Santa Clara County, the news was only slightly less severe. While schools in Silicon Valley generally outperform students elsewhere in the state on standardized tests, 1 in 5 – or 20.2 percent – of students drop out before graduation. Locally, the dropout rate was highest for Latino students.

To download state, county, district, and school-level dropout data, visit the Department of Education’s DataQuest Web site at: http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/