Durham Public Schools released its dropout report for the 2009-2009 school year last week and the news is not great, but steady. DPS, which lost 444 students last year, hovers a shade below the state’s dropout rate — 4.26 percent of DPS students dropped out versus the state’s 4.27 percent.
The number of dropouts may not be climbing — by much, anyway; five more kids dropped out last year than the year before — but that’s not good enough.
The DPS strategy is to continue middle and high school reform efforts. Officials credit the reforms “along with programs that work to ensure students are engaged and learning” with the rate holding fairly steady.
Other stakeholders have different ideas, and that’s where Robert Balfanz comes in.
Balfanz, a co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, provided the seed for a Duke University-DPS partnership that will try to track early warning signs and intervene before students even get to high school.
In his paper, “An Early Warning System,” Balfanz cites studies that say four factors can predict whether a sixth-grader will drop out after she turns 16:
- Attendance below 80 percent
- A final “unsatisfactory” mark for behavior in at least one class
- A final grade of “F” in math
- A final grade of “F” in English
The numbers are pretty shocking: Students who show just one of the indicators have a 75 percent chance of dropping out of high school, Balfanz says.
Targeting the highest-risk sixth-graders is the first part of the challenge, and Duke University’s Office of Durham and Regional Affair is footing the bill for an analysis of DPS students to figure out which students and which schools need help.
After that, Duke and its partners will launch a middle school-based pilot study to intervene with students whose behavior, attendance or classwork needs improvement.
Durham parents and educators can be forgiven if they suffer from “solution fatigue.”
The system is plagued by low-performing schools and a persistent dropout rate, and the only fixes that we haven’t tried are the ones we haven’t heard about yet.
But we can’t give up, and we can’t give in. These kids and the ones who follow them — their kids, eventually — are too important.
We appreciate that DPS and Duke are still in the fight.
