Just 25 of California's 2,462 high schools account for more than a fifth of the state's dropouts, with the problem heavily concentrated in charter and alternative schools, according to a study being released today by UC Santa Barbara.
However, a UCSB researcher said it wasn't clear whether the schools were responsible for the problem or were simply the recipients of a disproportionate share of troubled students. And some educators and school advocates criticized the report -- either for relying on questionable data or for releasing potentially explosive statistics without context.
The report, issued as part of the California Dropout Research Project, used readily available state data to compile a list of every high school in the state ranked by the number of students listed as dropouts last year.
It showed that, of the 10 schools that reported the highest numbers of dropouts, only one was a traditional, comprehensive high school -- and the principal of that school said it ranked so high because of a data error. The rest were alternative schools, most of them charters and all specializing in education for high-risk students who couldn't make it in conventional schools.
Russell Rumberger, a professor of education at UC Santa Barbara and director of the dropout project, said Wednesday that the report wasn't intended to answer questions about why the schools had so many dropouts but rather to give educators a snapshot they could use to map out future research.
"Is the school doing a bad job, or are the kids at risk anyway no matter what setting they're in?" Rumberger asked in a conference call with reporters. Either way, he said, the value of the study is in telling the public, "This is where we should be concerned."
Rumberger stressed that he wasn't judging the individual schools at the top of the list, but added, "If that many kids are dropping out, it's unlikely that you're doing a good job."
That comment angered Buzz Breedlove, director of John Muir Charter School, a Sacramento-based organization that operates programs for at-risk students at 43 locations throughout California. It was No. 1 on the UC Santa Barbara list, with 1,856 dropouts -- more students than are enrolled at the school.
"To reconfigure numbers and come up with a dropout rate of 149%, which on its face is ludicrous, doesn't suggest to me that very much thought went into these numbers," said Breedlove, a former nonpartisan policy analyst for the California Legislature.
