Opinion: Parsing dropouts

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

In a college class on psycholinguistics, the professor told us about a study in which researchers had sorted letters depending on how many features they had in common—horizontal lines, left-facing curves, etc. Then they flashed the letters in front of subjects and tested their recall.

They found that the more features two letters had in common, the more likely subjects were to mistake them for each other. In other words, subjects confused E and F more frequently than, say, E and U.
The obvious question here was: You mean, somebody actually spent time and money to discover that letters that look more alike really do look more alike?

I was reminded of that class when I read about the new study out of UC Santa Barbara on dropouts. A professor ranked California schools on their dropout rates and found that the schools with the worst dropout rates were alternative schools created to help students most at risk of dropping out. In many cases, these are students who already left regular schools, often years ago, and are, bit by bit, building up credits toward a diploma.

So did we just get a study that found out the students most likely to drop out really are more likely to drop out?

I’m uncertain, and the researcher, Professor Russell Rumberger, was honest enough to say he wasn’t certain either. He said the study wasn’t supposed to answer questions about why certain schools had higher dropout rates, but to provide basic statistics for future research.

Still, when a university puts out a press release, as UC Santa Barbara did, and a professor holds a telephone press conference, they’ve got to be aware that the study doesn’t simply come off as fodder for more research. Especially when so many of the schools catering to the highest-risk students are charter schools, always a hot- button issue in the education world.

It would be worth knowing whether those charter schools are succeeding at their mission. Are they worth the continued public investment? That’s a study I’d like to see.

But when I see a university put out a chart that claims the dropout rate for Los Angeles Unified School District is 5.1% (others have pegged it at anywhere from 25% to nearly half), I have to wonder how close to reality this is. It’s not Rumberger’s fault that California does an awful job of counting its dropouts, but that’s all the more reason to be careful with the numbers and what they look like they’re showing.