1. Locating and Preventing the Dropout Crisis
How to Target and Transform
High Schools Which Produce
The Nation’s Dropouts
Robert Balfanz & Nettie Legters
Center for Social Organization of Schools
Johns Hopkins University
Prepared for the National High School Center Summer Institute
June 11, 2007

2. Why Transform Low Performing High Schools?

3. Dropout Crisis 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year
7,000/day, 12 million over the next decade
Half of the nation’s dropouts attended a dropout factory

4. Where Did All The Freshmen Go?
12th Graders
197
11th Graders
259
10th Graders
327
9th Graders
484
Number of 9th Graders in 1996/97 = 669
% Fewer 12th graders in 1999/2000 than 9th graders 1996/97 = 71%

5. How Many Dropout Factories Are There?

6. Where Are The Nation’s Dropout Factories Located?
About Half are Located in Northern, Midwestern and Western Cities
The rest are primarily found throughout the South and Southwest

7. About Half are Located in Northern, Midwestern and Western Cities
The rest are primarily found throughout the South and Southwest
Counties with 1 or more weak promoting power high schools (gray shading) and counties with 5 or more weak promoting power high schools (black shading),

8. Who Attends Dropout Factories?
Students who live in Poverty
Minority Students

9. Dropout Factories and Minority Concentration

10. Percent of Minority Students Attending Dropout Factories

11. Poverty and Dropout Factories

12. Consequences of Dropping Out
A new high school dropout in 2000 had less than a 50% chance of getting a job
That job earned less than ½ of what the same job earned 20 years ago
Lack of education is ever more strongly correlated with welfare dependency and incarceration
Some U.S. jobs cannot be filled by U.S. trained skilled employees
Three reasons why we should care about this:
Social and economic justice—50 years after Brown vs Board, we still have what amounts to educational apartheid.
Worse in todays economy (slide)
Over the last decade, prison enrollments tripled, with largest increases for high school dropouts
Funding for jails increased 600% while funding for schools increased 25%
More than 50% of inmates are illiterate
40% of juvenile offenders have learning disabilities never identified in school
Incarceration and other dropout costs pose a large fiscal burden on the nation
Squandering the potential and severely limiting life chances of too many young people.
Better educating our nation’s young people, especially those from poverty and minority backgrounds, is simply the right thing to do. It is what we must do to raise the quality of life and elicit the best from our youth, ourselves, and our nation as a whole.

13. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

14. Is It Possible…
to create systems of high schools that create success and opportunity for all students, regardless of color, creed, or socio-economic status?
to create organizations that are so open, so responsive, so resourced, so skillful, that movement toward that ideal is inevitable?

15. What Does This System Look Like?
Essential Elements

16. The Yoga of High School Reform
High standards AND relevance AND personalization
Organization AND Instruction
Literacy AND Math
New small schools AND Large School Conversions
Prescription AND Participation
The Tortoise AND The Hare

17. How Do We Create These Systems?

18. Identify Schools and Students
Implement System of Comprehensive, Targeted, and Intensive Interventions
Models and Evidence
States as Brokers of Diversified Portfolio of High Schools

19. Challenges
Transforming low performing high schools and systems is not easy, fast, or cheap

20. Not Easy
Need comprehensive and systemic approach to avoid isolated efforts that exacerbate inequity
Consider multiple approaches as appropriate to context
Develop and scale-up technical and human supports for transformation
Align federal, state, district, and school-based efforts

21. Not Fast
“The trick is how to sustain interest in a reform that requires a generation to complete.”
Debbie Meyer
NCLB & States must acknowledge reality and progress using multiple indicators

22. Not Cheap Continue and expand public and private funding
Institutionalize targeted resources
Title I
Perkins
Dedicated Fund for Low Performing High Schools

23. Benefits > Costs
A recent study finds that our nation can recoup 45 billion dollars in lost tax revenues, health care expenditures, and social service outlays if we cut the number of high school dropouts in half (Levin et. al, 2007).
If we cut the number by 20%, eminently doable, we recoup 18million. Looking at now a 2billion investment—18:1 return.
These are funds that could be put toward reducing the national deficit and reinvested in ways that secure, strengthen, and extend our economy and civil society.

24. Coming Soon… Graduation Promise Act (GPA)
$2.5 Billion High School Reform/Dropout Reduction Bill co-sponsored by Senators Bingaman (D-NM) and Burr (R-NC)

25. What Would You Do With $40 Million?

26. If We Act Now…
We Can Transform the Nation’s Dropout Factories and Grad Gap High Schools
In So Doing we can
Transform the Nation

27. The Last Slide The Center for Social Organization of Schools
Johns Hopkins University
3003 N. Charles St., Ste. 200
Baltimore, MD