High school dropout rate reaches highest in 14 years

The Massachusetts high school dropout rate reached 3.7 percent in 2004, the highest rate in 14 years, prompting Education Commissioner David P. Driscoll to call on school officials to work harder at making sure that students earn a diploma.

A state report released yesterday said 10,633 students statewide left school prior to graduation last year. That figure was an increase from 9,389 in 2003, when the dropout rate was 3.3 percent.

Projections also raised concerns among school officials. In Boston, the state's biggest school system, 31 percent of the current junior class is expected to drop out prior to graduation in 2007, according to the report. One-quarter of the class of 2005 had been projected to drop out.

School administrators expressed disappointment at the rising dropout rates after seeing some improvement in recent years. Thomas Galligani, principal of Somerville High, said he would meet with teachers and administrators to find out if rates are on an upward trend. ''In the last number of years it's been going down," he said. ''It frightens me, because I don't want to see it going the other way."

Driscoll's spokeswoman, Heidi B. Perlman, said the commissioner wants school systems to report to him the reasons why an increasing number of students are dropping out.

''We owe it to our young people to build a system that will ensure every single one of our students feels connected to and engaged in their learning and gets the support they need to reach full success in high school and graduate," Driscoll said in a statement. ''This is, quite simply, our responsibility as educators."

The report found that the state's schools are losing in greatest proportion those who are struggling the most: low-income students, limited-English students, Hispanic students, and special education students.

''It seems we have neglected the most vulnerable students," said Anne Wheelock, a senior research associate at Boston College. ''If after 10 years of education reform we have the highest dropout rate in 10 years, something is not working well."

The dropout rate nationally has hovered around 5 percent between 1996 and 2001, the latest year national data is available, said Chris Chapman, a statistician with the National Center for Education Statistics.

In the Bay State, dropout rates increased across all ethnic and racial groups, but Hispanic students had the highest, at 8 percent. The 2004 total includes thousands of students who flunked the MCAS, a requirement for graduation. More than half of the juniors and more than a third of the seniors who dropped out failed the test.

Statewide, 18.2 percent of students who were held back in the 2003-04 school year dropped out.

''It's very clear that students who are over age for their grade are very likely to drop out," said Wheelock. ''Those are sort of like little time bombs.

In Boston, 8.4 percent of students dropped out in 2004, compared to 8.1 percent in Springfield, 4.5 percent in Lowell, 11.2 percent in Lawrence, and 5.8 percent in Worcester. Boston received a $275,000 grant in January from a coalition of national foundations to lower the dropout rate and bring back students who left school.

The Noonan Business Academy, one of three small high schools formed from the former Dorchester High School, posted the highest dropout rate among Boston's nonalternative high schools. In 2004, more than a quarter of the students at the 280-student school dropped out.

Headmaster Jack Leonard said the dropout rate was high during 2003-04, the school's first year, because many of its students came from an alternative program that had existed in the basement of Dorchester High.

That year, more than half of the freshmen had at least one F on their report cards, Leonard said.

In response, Leonard extended the school day last year by 75 minutes twice a week for freshmen to work on study skills, reading comprehension, and homework. The number of F's on report cards dropped by 14 percent, he said.

However, ''there are still critical gaps in what the system is addressing," said John Mudd, senior project director at Massachusetts Advocates for Children, referring to the high dropout rates among students with disabilities, those with limited English proficiency, and black and Latino students in Boston.

The state needs to rethink the way schools educate older students with limited English proficiency, said Melissa Colon, director of Iniciativa, a nonprofit that works to improve Latino student achievement across the state. Schools should be open to working with churches, businesses, and Latino and immigrant community agencies to create a pipeline to graduation for Latino students, she said.

''It's really difficult for an older English language learner to master physics, US history, biology, and chemistry if they haven't mastered English," Colon said.

Schools across the state run programs to keep students from dropping out, from alternative schools designed for dropouts to sending school officials to homes to make sure students return to school. Somerville High puts students at risk of dropping out in a class to work on ways to stay in school.

The Champion Charter Public School in Brockton offers an alternative to 125 at-risk students. Teachers know them all, and students must take a community college course to graduate, which serves as an incentive to get them through high school to college.

But the school still has one of the highest dropout rates in the state, 55 percent, because it serves exclusively at-risk students. They face a variety of challenges: some are homeless, others have to work to help their families, and many are failing academically.

''There's a great need for alternatives," said Principal Virginia Warn. ''Not everybody does well with a standardized education."

2004 dropout trends

Black and Hispanic students dropped out at a higher rate than white and Asian students. Hispanic students dropped out at the highest rate in every grade, with the highest being 10.1 percent in the 12th grade.

4.3 percent of boys dropped out, compared to 3.1 percent of girls.

5.7 percent of students from poor families dropped out, compared to 3.1 percent of other students.

5.4 percent of special education students dropped out, compared to 3.2 percent of other students.

7.6 percent of students with limited English proficiency dropped out, compared to 3.5 percent of other students.

5.5 percent of immigrant students -- those born outside the United States and who have been educated in the country for fewer than three years -- dropped out, compared to 3.6 percent of other students.

Source: Department of Education report