SFUSD's secret?
San Francisco schools are improving in many areas, but quietly rising dropout numbers are a cause for concern

By Tali Woodward

San Francisco Unified School District superintendent Arlene Ackerman touted improvements in academic achievement during a Jan. 21 speech: "Happily, I can report that in San Francisco Unified, we are beginning to shatter the notion of a bell curve because we are raising expectations and standards for all students."

Many share this rosy assessment of the SFUSD. Yet one important measure of school district success – a measure that's also been at the center of a recent national scandal – shows things appear to be getting worse.

The number of kids who are dropping out of school is increasing, according to an SFUSD internal memo laying out statistics on racial inequity in the district. It states 895 high schoolers dropped out during the 2002-03 year, compared with 609 the previous year. That's an increase of 46 percent. The number of middle school dropouts also increased – though less dramatically, with 184 kids dropping out during the 2002-03 year, 30 more than the year before.

Despite Ackerman's well-publicized crusade to stamp out the academic-achievement gap between students of different races, African American and Latino students continue to drop out at much higher rates than other students.

The Bay Guardian started asking the school district questions about the dropout numbers several weeks ago. In response to a public information request, we were given copies of annual dropout reports that show slightly different numbers than the memo. Making matters more confusing, neither set of numbers matches those available from the California Department of Education.

But none of the statistics contradict the fact that the number of dropouts jumped last year.

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Dropout numbers are notoriously slippery. It's often a logistical challenge to figure out precisely what's happened when a particular student stops coming to school. Which ones have dropped out, and which have merely moved out of the county or transferred to a private school? The real intent of calculating dropout rates is to figure out how many children are quitting school before they graduate.

The SFUSD says the apparent increase in dropouts may be due to a new effort to track students, but when you look at enrollment data, it's obvious many kids aren't making it through the district. The class that graduated in 2003, for instance, had 1,000 fewer students than it did at the start of high school three years earlier.

Myong Leigh, the district's chief of policy and planning, emphasized that the data is often hard to collect. Every time a student doesn't show up at his or her assigned school in the fall, "the clerk has to make a determination based on the best available information, which is sometimes incomplete, where the student is." Leigh said that clerks try to get in touch with the student's family, but that to make contact "for every student is difficult, if not impossible."

The district has begun to make more of an effort to track dropouts, Leigh said, providing training to clerks and establishing a rule that if a certain student's status is unknown, he or she will be recorded as a dropout. In the past district standards have been more nebulous.

Recent scandals in Texas and New York have shown that not all manipulations of dropout data are unintentional. Administrators in both places cooked data to make it look like fewer students were falling through the cracks, and the loss of some low-performing students in Texas also inflated test scores and led George W. Bush to use the "Texas miracle" as part of his campaign pitch when he was running for president. The problems with the data were exposed later.

Leigh insists this is not happening in San Francisco. "Unlike places like Houston, we've been going the other way. Even if it leads to an [apparent] increase," he said. "I do know that nationwide, this metric is a hard one to pin down. It's an important thing for us and everyone to be aware of, but its power is compromised" by the challenges of collecting relevant information.

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Kathy Emery, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on reform measures and high-stakes testing in the SFUSD and now volunteers with the San Francisco Organizing Project, told us the ambiguity is itself a problem. She thinks more attention needs to be paid to students at risk of dropping out.

"Why do we know so much about test scores, but we don't know about dropout rates?" she asked.

Why might dropout numbers be going up? Emery agrees with other youth advocates that the high school exit exam may be encouraging kids to abandon their schooling, since they may soon find it impossible to get a diploma even if they attend class consistently.

"The fact that we don't release these numbers and that there's no move whatsoever to do anything about this is very upsetting," San Francisco Board of Education member Mark Sanchez told us.

"If a kid leaves Mission High tomorrow, we don't find out what happened," Sanchez said, adding that the district's dropout rate has "never been discussed in my three years on the board." And with the emphasis on test scores, "there's not an incentive to keep these kids in school, because they'll make us look bad. With what's coming to light in New York and Texas, we have to be very careful."

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