The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has announced some discouraging news for schools, parents, and students. According to DPI, the dropout rate for grades nine to 12 is up from 4.78 percent in 2002-03, to 4.86 percent in 2003-04. The rate represents 20,035 students, a 1.7 percent increase over the 19,000 students reported as dropouts the previous year.

“Every student who drops out of school represents lost potential for the student, for his or her family, for the community, and for the state,” State Superintendent Patricia Willoughby said in a press release. “It is vitally important for all students to earn high school diplomas and to be well-prepared for adulthood.”

The State Board of Education is not raising an alarm over the dropout situation, but there is renewed interest at the State Board in raising the compulsory school attendance age from 16 to 17 years old. DPI, meanwhile, notes that the grade nine to 12 dropout rate has actually fallen by 28.3 percent since 1998.

Statistics are no cause for alarm

Not so, says Brunswick County parent J. Fanti, who worries that parents of black teen-age boys, in particular, are getting the wrong message with the latest state statistics. “They think there’s nothing to worry about,” Fanti said, “so they aren’t motivated to do anything differently.”

In a discussion with Carolina Journal about the lack of role models, lack of parent support, and lack of honesty with parents about the state of education in public high schools, Fanti expressed frustration and annoyance. In his case, teachers informed him that they “didn’t want my son to get in trouble,” by returning calls he made asking about his child’s progress.

As a result, this parent learned about school work problems after it was too late to take remedial action at home. He isn’t surprised that kids with absent parents, or ones who don’t care, don’t make it through high school at all. Understating the dropout problem doesn’t help, he said, and he wants the state to make it clear to parents that there is a graduation crisis among minority students, particularly young minority males.

The dropout rates for some student subgroups were substantially higher than the 4.86 percent state average. American Indians had the highest rate, at 9.78 percent, followed by Hispanics at 8.67, blacks at 5.91 percent, whites at 4.46 percent, and Asians at 2.57 percent.

The most frequent reason for dropping out? Poor attendance, in an overwhelming 59 percent of cases. Moving accounted for about 11 percent of dropouts, while academic problems ranked third, responsible for slightly less than 9 percent of North Carolina’s high school dropouts.

How many ways to measure?

Along with parents, education research organizations such as the Manhattan Institute question the validity of using high school dropout rates to measure school success. They insist that the four-year high school graduation rate provides a much more accurate measure of who, and how many students are making it through high school.

Jay Greene and Greg Forster, in their MI study “Public High School Graduation Rates and College Readiness Rates in the United States, 2003,” determined that North Carolina high schools graduated only 63 percent of the students who started high school four years earlier. Even among the graduates, only 40 percent were “college ready,” according to the report.

There is a big difference between a dropout rate and a graduation rate. The North Carolina Dropout Data Report counts as a dropout a student who “was enrolled in school at some time during the previous year,” and either was not enrolled on day 20, or has not graduated because of transfer, temporary absence, or death. The state’s count is called the duplicated count because it is possible to count the same student as a separate dropout every year.

Since the state measure is a year-to-year count, it does not reveal what percentage of students make it through all four high school years. The current dropout rate tells us that for students in grades nine to 12, on average, 4.86 percent fewer students in each grade were enrolled during the 20-day counting period than were enrolled the previous year. It does not mean that 95 percent of students who enrolled in the ninth grade graduated four years later.

This difference is what has some parents alarmed. In 1999, North Carolina enrolled 116,861 ninth grade students in public high schools. In 2002-03, there were 73,523 12th-grade students enrolled. Based on final enrollment figures, 37 percent, or 43,338 students, dropped out during that four-year period. That means that only 63 percent of the entering class graduated, a figure that sounds far more ominous than the 4.86 percent dropout rate.

A June 2004 Johns Hopkins University study reinforces the sense of concern about graduation, and minorities in particular. According to Locating the Dropout Crisis, high schools that serve mostly minority students are five times more likely than mostly white schools to have “weak promoting power” — to graduate 50 percent or fewer freshmen to senior status on time.

Making it tougher to graduate

State education officials are planning to make it tougher to graduate, despite the rising dropout rates. Students will have to pass 20 high school courses, including five core curriculum courses. Potential graduates must also pass reading and math tests geared to eighth-grade competency. In addition, the state end-of-course tests may count more heavily toward passing a course, toward graduation, or both.

According to state officials, if these requirements had been in place in the 2003-04 school year, only about half of last year’s high school students would have graduated, and only 20 percent of minority students could have done so in 2003-04.

Karen Palasek is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.