California’s high school dropout problem has been underestimated, a civil rights group said Wednesday, with more accurate figures showing only about half of male Hispanic and black students earn regular high school diplomas.
The revised data led officials with The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University to call for improvements to dropout rate calculation methods and more accountability over the high number of dropouts.
The state has reported a graduation rate of 87 percent. Researchers using a different methodology found an overall graduation rate of 71 percent for 2002.
They also found that graduation rates for minority students were significantly lower — 57 percent rate for blacks, 60 percent for Hispanics and 52 percent for American Indians.
For minority males, the figures were 50 percent for blacks, 54 percent for Hispanics and 46 percent for American Indians.
The graduation rate reflects the percentage of 9th grade students who graduate with a regular diploma with their 12th grade class.
The figures were released ahead of a conference on graduation rates scheduled for Thursday in Los Angeles that is expected to draw about 400 education researchers, teachers and policy makers.
Gary Orfield, director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, said the current graduation rate reporting system is “extremely inadequate” because it allows high school principals and staff to report whether students dropped out or transferred.
“There’s no incentive for them to report that they dropped out and they can easily report that they transferred someplace else because nobody ever checks up on the data,” Orfield said. “There’s almost no money invested at the state level or the federal level in determining whether people actually graduate.”
The revised method developed by the Urban Institute is more accurate because it uses enrollment data that are tracked through grade levels, Orfield said.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said the study’s results weren’t surprising because the state has long known of the academic gap among minority students.
