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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > June > 29 > Entry
Editorial: Dayton shows it can rescue dropouts
For all the challenges facing Dayton schools and their students — and they are many — there is one good news story: Far more kids are graduating than did so just a few years ago.
Dayton is now at an 83.5 percent graduation rate, up 30 points from a disastrously low 53.5 percent six years ago. The district still has work to do, but its impressive gain is testament to the value of hard work and focus.
The way Dayton made this gain also has implications for education policymakers and could be a road map for other struggling urban districts.
The turnaround started by digging into data. One of the early moves of former Superintendent Percy Mack and the school board under Gail Littlejohn and her team was to hire a director of accountability and beef up the department that tracks statistics — test scores, attendance, graduation figures.
As the district delved into graduation rates, administrators found a significant number of kids were being counted as dropouts even though they actually had transferred to other schools. There was a disconnect that prevented matching the fact that records had been requested by another school (the best sign a student has transferred) with the data on dropouts.
This might seem like a ridiculously basic step for the district to miss, and, to an extent, it is. But remember that Dayton students are extremely transient. It’s quite common for a student to move several times in a school year, sometimes to a school outside the district and then back.
Also, there is no formal procedure by which districts notify each other that a student has transferred. Districts have to have the sense to track records requests. This is silly. Ohio is developing a system that assigns each student in the state a unique ID that would ease tracking of transfers, but it’s still several years away from implementation.
At the same time that it was figuring out who transferred and who didn’t, Dayton also began improving its reporting and tracking of daily attendance, which previously had been a mess. This helped schools more quickly identify kids who were absent a lot. Attendance was 90.8 percent last year — still below the 93 percent the state expects, but several points higher than in prior years.
Beyond cleaning up data, Mr. Mack instituted new disciplinary rules. They weren’t perfect, and discipline remains a problem in some schools even today. But the changes were an improvement over previously lax policies.
The district also has gotten aggressive during the past six years about addressing students who are flunking classes. Students who fail courses in high school now are quickly offered an opportunity to make up the work through a computer-based course that they can complete at their own pace before and after school. That keeps kids from falling behind and on track toward graduating.
One big 2002 study, by Johns Hopkins University of dropouts in Philadelphia, which tracked kids for six years beginning in sixth grade, studied a host of data about kids who did not graduate and found four factors that correlated to at least a 75 percent likelihood that a student would drop out: a final grade of F in math; a final grade of F in English; attendance below 80 percent in a year; or a final “unsatisfactory” behavior mark in any class.
It’s impressive how closely aligned Dayton’s improvement efforts were with research that was just emerging at the time. Its interventions hit all four of those areas.
The issues Dayton has tried to address — sloppy data and a lack of attention to kids who are failing classes, misbehaving or skipping school — are common to many urban districts.
If Dayton can keep refining its efforts to hang on to students, keep its momentum and eventually see 90 or 95 percent of kids graduate, it could become a model for others to study and replicate.
It’s making great strides.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Comments
By Anne Beane
July 3, 2009 6:23 PM | Link to this
Montgomery County’s out-of-school youth initiative is one very good reason Dayton Public Schools is improving performance! We recover students who have left DPS, thereby helping to improve the DPS graduation rate. Mound Street Academies has improved to a report card Continuous Improvement rating for all 3 schools! Please contact us for more information. Thank you!By Anne Beane
July 3, 2009 6:23 PM | Link to this
Montgomery County’s out-of-school youth initiative is one very good reason Dayton Public Schools is improving performance! We recover students who have left DPS, thereby helping to improve the DPS graduation rate. Mound Street Academies has improved to a report card Continuous Improvement rating for all 3 schools! Please contact us for more information. Thank you!By Anne Beane
July 3, 2009 6:24 PM | Link to this
Montgomery County’s out-of-school youth initiative is one very good reason Dayton Public Schools is improving performance! We recover students who have left DPS, thereby helping to improve the DPS graduation rate. Mound Street Academies has improved to a report card Continuous Improvement rating for all 3 schools! Please contact us for more information. Thank you!