News Briefs

City HS dropout rate could rise again, report says

Feb 1, 2008 10:06 AM

The progress New York City announced in curbing the high school dropout rate “while promising, is limited and might not be lasting,” reports City Limits Investigates in its Winter 2008 issue.

Despite a 60 percent graduation rate, the highest in 20 years, those considered “graduates” included thousands of students who obtained GEDs, and the third of graduates who obtained “local diplomas” that will soon be phased out. Absent also are the thousands of students who were discharged from city schools — kids who left the system ostensibly to attend other schools but are not tracked.

The report also lists things that the UFT frequently raises with the Department of Education: that many of the new small schools meant to attract at-risk kids do not enroll special education students, non-English speakers and other special-need students; and that just 16 percent of high schoolers at risk of dropping out attend those programs.

“The DOE could not say how many students it had sent to various programs in 2007, nor could it detail how many students actually remained in their new placements,” a summary of the report notes.

The DOE is also frequently charged with “pushing out” students from their original high schools into alternative programs where they aren’t well tracked or are simply asked to leave school, then classified as “discharges” in order to improve schools’ graduation rates. Despite a 2004 lawsuit requiring the DOE to conduct interviews with discharged students to prevent dropouts, the DOE provided no data about those interviews to the magazine.

City Limits Weekly, Jan. 21