North Carolina’s public schools are in the midst of a dropout crisis. Last year, more than 22,000 public school students dropped out of school. Only about 70 percent of our students graduate from high school in four years.
In response to this crisis, the General Assembly has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to fund grant programs that promised to keep more children in school, but mostly failed to deliver.
In 2007, Democratic members of the General Assembly encouraged school systems and organizations to compete for $7 million in grants set aside to support programs that address dropout prevention. In January 2008, the Committee on Dropout Prevention selected 60 groups to receive grants ranging in size from $25,000 to $150,000.
The General Assembly later voted to re-establish the dropout prevention committee and appropriate an additional $15 million. The funds provided additional support to grant recipients, funded applicants that did not receive a grant initially, and supported new grant applicants.
In early 2009, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction appropriated nearly $100,000 in state funds to pay a Raleigh-based consultant to evaluate the grant programs over the next year and a half. The purpose of this evaluation is to determine whether school districts across the state should replicate particular dropout initiatives.
Since February 2008, the John Locke Foundation has conducted three evaluations of the dropout prevention grants. We found that a majority of the dropout prevention grants went to school districts or individual schools that did not have a dropout problem. Most of the grant-funded districts and schools had a higher percentage of graduates and/or lower percentage of dropouts than the state average.
Among districts receiving grants last year, 27 of 38 posted a declining graduation rate. Moreover, only 14 of the 100 schools that received services from dropout prevention grant recipients had both substantially lower dropout rates and higher graduation rates.
After taking a closer look at grant recipient expenditures, it is not hard to understand why the programs appeared to have little success. For example, Athens Drive High School in Wake County used its grant funds to send its lead literacy teacher to the University of Kansas to learn “Kansas Strategies,” a literacy program for at-risk children. Of the $38,979 awarded to Athens Drive, expenditures included $1,466.83 for travel, $800 for registration, $4,000 for supplemental materials, and another $1,500 for training materials.
From the 2006-07 to the 2007-08 school year, Athens Drive retained fewer students — the graduation rate decreased by 4 percent, and the dropout rate increased by nearly 1 percent.
Hayesville High School and Hayesville Middle School in Clay County used their dropout prevention funds to buy $32,500 worth of equipment, including 30 computers, electric notepads, calculators, three smart boards, 19 document readers, and five document cams.
The Avery County Schools spent nearly $45,500 of their $148,474 grant on contract fees to the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program, spent more than $18,500 on staff development (possibly for the AVID Summer Institute in Atlanta, Ga., for 23 employees), and used almost $13,000 in grant funds for supplies.
In Polk County, the school system’s $100,000-plus grant included more than $3,000 for student meals.
We do not know if grant recipients made even more egregious expenditures than those mentioned above. Many of the 2007 grant recipients did not submit a mandatory progress report, which means that the public does not have access to the programs’ goals and objectives, activities, and budget.
Put simply, the General Assembly spent millions of taxpayer dollars on a dropout prevention program that lacks transparency, oversight, and accountability — and thousands of children continue to drop out school.
Terry Stoops, a former public school teacher, is education policy analyst at the John Locke Foundation.