Getting the drop on the dropout rate

ANDREW SUM, the director of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, said a hidden dropout crisis in Massachusetts has become an "absolute disgrace." Lost in the broader quest to raise standards, he said, dropouts should be the "first priority" of Governor Deval Patrick's education initiative.

"Dropouts have never been an issue for any governor, never received anything close to the attention they should have gotten to my knowledge," Sum said. "What has not been articulated very well is the sheer magnitude of the gaps."

Seconding that in their own way were Jay Smink, director of the National Dropout Prevention Center at Clemson University, and Neil Sullivan, executive director of Boston's Private Industry Council.

"Massachusetts has never jumped off the page with any government-driven, or department of education-driven dropout prevention programs," Smink said.

"It's buried in the public policy bowels," Sullivan said.

Patrick talks as if he will exhume the dropouts. In his commencement address at UMass-Boston, he said he knows that over two-thirds of prison and jail inmates have no high school diploma.

In a recent interview he said he expects to cut into the dropout rate by 25 percent by the end of his first term, the beginning of seeing the rate fall to the single digits by 2020. On Beacon Hill, state Senator Edward Augustus of Worcester has filed a bill that sets a goal of reducing the dropout rate 50 percent by 2012 by implementing early indicator systems and providing outreach programs and alternative pathways to a diploma.

"We have literally thousands (over 11,000) of kids who disappear from the system every year," Augustus said. "But they don't disappear from Massachusetts. We don't have an economy that can absorb these kids any more."

The combined 2006 high school graduation rate of Sharon, Lincoln-Sudbury, Concord, Wellesley, Weston, and Dover was nearly 97 percent, according to the Department of Education. The combined graduation rate of Boston, Lawrence, Holyoke, Springfield, Chelsea, and Fall River was only 50 percent.

Even more scary is a new analysis Sum conducted on state data. He concludes that in wealthy suburbs such as Concord, Weston, Dover, Sharon, and Wellesley, an average of 89 percent of male seniors in the class of 2006 graduated on time from their entry in ninth grade and planned on going straight into a four-year college or university.

In Holyoke, Lawrence, Chelsea, Springfield, and Fall River, only 12 percent of male seniors in the class of 2006 graduated on time and planned on going straight into a four-year school. That means a young man from the above wealthy suburbs is seven times more likely to be on the fast track than a young man from some of the poorest cities in the Commonwealth. The widest individual district divide was nearly 11-to-1 between Concord (90.2 percent fast track rate) and Holyoke (8.5 percent).

Boston is barely ahead of the poorest districts, with only 23 percent of 2006 male seniors on the fast track.

"The gaps are so big that I'm not sure the governor's promise of free community college tuition will have the meaning he intends it to have," Sum said. "Many of these kids start falling behind in seventh grade. The ninth grade is a cliff where they get failed for things they did not know in sixth, seventh, and eighth."

Earlier this year, Sum released data that showed that the average high school dropout will be a lifetime drain on taxpayers to the tune of about $275,000 for social services and/or incarceration. A high school graduate will be a net plus of about $180,000. A bachelor's degree holder will be a net plus of $825,000. "If we don't change that, there's nothing we can do with so many other problems," Sum said.

Patrick's top adviser on education, Dana Mohler-Faria, president of Bridgewater State College, said he hopes much of the long-term dropout problem and the aspiration to college can be attacked with early education for everyone.

For current adolescents who have fallen off the cliff or are edging up to it, Mohler-Faria, speaking for himself, said he would like to see: targeted dropout prevention assistance for low performing schools, colleges partnering with schools to provide mentors and role models, and strategies that would give teachers and staff more time to update and engage parents in their child's progress.

"This is really difficult to tackle," Mohler-Faria said. "But we can't consider anyone a throwaway." The Patrick administration can be one of the few to prove it.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.