In L.A. County's San Gabriel Unified, students stay out more than they check in. (Photo courtesy of the San Gabriel Unified School District.)

Two hundred seventy-two thousand Los Angeles County students were truant during the 2008-2009 school year. Let that sink in. Two hundred seventy-two thousand kids. That is 16 percent of all the students attending schools in the heart of Southern California, or 1,509 students skipping school without an excuse every school day.

We know where many of these kids will end up: They will become high school dropouts. What is astounding is that thanks to California education officials and the state legislature, we even know the truancy rate at all. Most states are ignoring the importance of reporting credible, honest truancy numbers, leaving unaddressed a critical symptom of the nation’s dropout crisis.

Within the past five years, researchers such as Robert Balfanz have proven that truancy is one of the foremost symptoms of America’s educational crisis and a primary indicator of whether a student will drop out or graduate from school. As Balfanz, Lisa Herzog and Douglas Mac Iver pointed out in a 2007 study, a sixth-grader missing a fifth of the school year has just a 13 percent chance of graduating six years later. In elementary school, truancy is a sign of parenting issues. In later grades, truancy is an indicator that a child has given up on learning after years of poor teaching, lousy curricula and lack of engagement (and caring) by teachers and principals.

Yet, as with graduation rates a decade ago, states and school districts do an abysmal job of tracking truancy (and school attendance overall) and offers misleading statistics on the true size of the problem. California offers a decent start on how to solve the latter. But it will require better data standards and data systems to make real progress.

The problem starts with the statistics itself. Most states calculate attendance by dividing the total number of days missed by students by the total number of days they are supposed to attend (usually 180 days multiplied by enrollment). This metric, used largely for school funding, is great for district coffers. But it’s terrible for addressing truancy. Why? It hides the levels of truancy plaguing a school because it includes all unexcused absences, not just the set number of days under which a student is considered by law to be truant. Add in the fact that tardiness (or excess lateness by a student) is added into the attendance rate and one doesn’t get the full sense of a truancy problem. After all, one reacts differently to a 93 percent attendance rate (which makes it seem as if most kids are attending school) than a rate that shows that 16 percent of students are truant (which is more-accurate and distressing).

What principals, teachers, district officials and parents need is the percentage of students reaching the state definition of truancy (in many states, 10 or more days of unexcused absences) — in order to identify clusters of truancy — and the chronic truants themselves (so they can be targeted for additional help). A group of teachers at New York City’s High School for Telecommunications – frustrated with the district’s poor attendance tracking — are among those developing technologies to improve how attendance is calculated. The technological solutions, however, are meaningless without developing actual calculations that plainly break down what is happening and making the data public for all to see.

California is one of two states (out of 10) surveyed by Dropout Nation that have gone this far in providing truancy data.  (Indiana, the epicenter for a 2007 editorial series Dropout Nation’s editor wrote on truancy for The Indianapolis Star, is the other). Unlike other states, the state Department of Education publishes something called an actual Truancy rate, which shows the percentage of students missing three or more days of school unexcused. Even better, its data system actually shows the number of truant students in any given county, district or school. For a researcher or truancy prevention advocate, this is a much-better first step in determining the extent of truancy than the traditional attendance rates reported by other states.

What one learns, particularly about truancy in districts in Los Angeles County, is distressing. Fifty-seven of L.A. County’s 88 school districts (including the county department of education) had truancy rates of greater than 10 percent. Within the county’s largest district, Los Angeles Unified, 77 of its 658 schools were plagued with truancy rates greater than 10 percent. While high schools were plagued with double-digit truancy rates, so were middle schools such as Charles Drew in the city’s Florence-Graham neighborhood; there, 54 percent of the student population were chronically truant. The truancy rate for L.A. Unified overall was 5.4 percent; but the number leaves out truancy levels at the elementary school level (where as many as one in ten kindergarten and first grade students miss a month of school). (A a full list is on L.A. County is available here.)

For all of its dysfunction, L.A. Unified doesn’t have the highest truancy rate in the county. That distinction belongs to the nearby San Gabriel Unified School District, where 61 percent of students were chronically truant. The level of unexplained absences starts early; 51 percent of students at Coolidge Elementary School were truant, while at Gabriellino High, the truancy rate was 86 percent. Another high-truancy district is Lynwood Unified, whose truancy rate of 56 percent was just below that of San Gabriel. Almost every one of the 3,152 students at Lynwood High School had missed three or more days of school without any explanation, while 81 percent of students at Cesar Chavez Middle School were truant.

The data  isn’t perfect. Tardiness is incorporated into the numbers, which could skew the number of actual absentees. One could also argue that three days of unexcused absence may be strict. But at least California has made a first step towards  reporting realistic attendance data — and school districts have information they can use to address the underlying causes of truancy.

This isn’t happening in a successful way. School districts in Los Angeles County haven’t exactly done a great job addressing truancy. Despite high-profile sweeps, anti-truancy ordinances and other efforts by districts in the county, the truancy rate countywide has barely budged between 2004-2005 and 2008-2009. L.A. Unified, even took the media-grabbing step of having its outgoing superintendent, Ramon Cortines and school board members go door to door to grab truants, is the only one that can report a decline, with a 34 percent decrease in truancy in that time. But even those efforts are only band-aids; more importantly, since the sweeps tend to happen during periods when districts must count up students in order to gain funding, the moves can viewed cynically  as just ways to keep the money flowing without actually doing anything to address the underlying causes of truancy. School district officials and charter school operators in L.A. County must do a better job of addressing the underlying issues — as must their counterparts throughout the nation.

But at least California (along with Indiana) has taken a step that most other states — especially Virginia and Tennessee, two of the other states surveyed by  Dropout Nation — refuse to do.  Accurate, honest, publicly-reported data is the critical first step to making the technological and academic changes needed to stop truancy in its tracks — and keep every kid on the path to economic, social and personal success.

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But this week, the Times managed to put together a report on teacher quality — and the lack of it — in L.A. Unified schools that deserves both a Pulitzer and an award for great advocacy. While teachers union bosses, defenders of the status quo and others debate the piece and its analysis of student test score data, here are two reasons why education reporters and school reform advocates should look to the Times report as their guide for their future work:

Data Shows the Reality: As Dropout Nation readers know so well, a major point of this site is to use data in order to fully dissect the problems within American public education. This is for good reason: Information reveals what the eyes often cannot see.

All high schools seem alike until one looks at such numbers as test score growth data and Promoting Power rates; that’s when you can tell the difference between a great school and a dropout factory. And as much as one may think you can tell a high-quality teacher just by watching them in a classroom, the reality is that you can’t. Not even the otherwise esteemable Jay Mathews is that perceptive.

Yet education reporters such as Mathews seem stuck in the belief that the best way to report on education and its impacts on society is in the classrooms. This isn’t so. The real causes and consequences of academic failure — and reasons behind the fruits of academic success — are seen not in schools, but in teacher education sessions at ed schools, during state legislative sessions, on unemployment lines and in prisons. It is also seen in data — from graduation rates to employment statistics. Without the data being the guide, reporting will often be a shallow collection of talking heads shooting off their mouths.

The Denver Post offered a fantastic example of using data in education coverage some years ago when it analyzed Denver’s graduation and promoting power rates. The Indianapolis Star has done the same — including my own string of series late in the decade and the work of Andy Gammill and Mark Nichols on suspension and expulsion. Although there have been some wonderful reporting done by education reporters in the past couple of years, few of them have risen to the level of those reports. Until the L.A. Times took it up a notch.

The Times did a great job in using data. Not only were Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith unafraid to approach the student test score data, they sought out expertise (in the form of Rand Corp. economist Richard Buddin) to help them make sense of it. They let the data serve as the guide to finding their subjects instead of just approaching teachers, smiling faces and classrooms of chaos. As someone who has done his share of data-driven reporting and opinion, I say they deserve two rounds of beers (and a few awards) for their great work. And I am more than happy to buy them the brew.

Education reporting has to get away from observing classrooms. Its reporters must no longer be afraid of wading into data analysis. The Times report is a sterling example of what should be done. We need more of this. Pronto.

Afflicting the comfortable: Folks such as Rick Hess and Alexander Russo take issue with the Times piece because it dares to actually name those teachers who are performing poorly and doing great work. At first, one can certainly understand the discomfort; after all, the teachers being shamed (including fifth-grade teacher John Smith, who took the brunt of the scrutiny) are folks who have thought they were doing great work and were never told by their district that this wasn’t so.

But let’s face facts: For one, the Times didn’t name every teacher evaluated in its study; just those it interviewed for the piece. The public can’t access the data unless they happen to be the L.A. Unified teachers evaluated for the project (although as commenter Tom Hoffman notes, the Times will make this a reality in its follow-up which will come tomorrow. And it should).

 Then we must remember that many of these teachers have likely been backers of the AFT’s longstanding opposition to the use of student test data in evaluating the teachers, the very reason why they never were told in the first place. More importantly, let’s not forget that teaching is a comfortable, well-compensated profession: They gain near-lifetime employment (through tenure) just after three years on the job; in L.A., a 20-year veteran makes more than $70,000 a year (more than the $63,859 earned by the average L.A. county family); their defined-benefit pensions are one of the reasons why California state government is essentially insolvent; their unions are the single most-influential force in education policy.

Journalism and advocacy are both about afflicting the comfortable on behalf of the afflicted. These poor-performing teachers are the comfortable. Worse, they are comfortable at the expense of the futures of young boys and girls, many of whom will never enjoy the kind of middle-class salaries and strong job protections their teachers receive. Meanwhile the high-quality teachers who are actually doing well — who deserve comfort — never get the full recognition (or the wide range of compensation and career opportunities) they so richly deserve.

Those who declare that the Times’ analysis was akin to a job evaluation are full of it. It isn’t. L.A. Unified doesn’t even use the data in its official evaluations (and until recently, couldn’t do so under state law). In any case, it isn’t any different than revealing salary data; as the soon-to-be husband of a former state government worker whose salary was exposed by the paper for which he had worked, I had to balance my own discomfort with the reality that government employees work for taxpayers — and thus, deserve to know what they are being paid.

Given that parents need to know about the quality of the teachers instructing their children (and should be able to choose high-quality teachers or reject those who are of low quality), revealing this information is not dangerous; as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would say, it’s the right thing to do. For far too long, poor-performing teachers have lurked in the shadows, aided and abetted by teachers unions, administrators and colleagues who instinctively (if not quantitatively) knew better and did nothing. On the other side, we have good-to-great teachers who are forced by their colleagues to remain quiet about their achievements (or in the case of the John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes, forced out of the profession because of jealousy within the ranks). The Times did what every news outlet is supposed to do. Hess and others shouldn’t be afraid to do it either.

[By the way: Gven that value-added analysis has stood up to three decades of scrutiny, it is appropriate to use it for analysis of the kind the Times has conducted (and for use in actually evaluating teachers). The arguments made by Hess and opponents of teacher quality reform against such uses are mere hogwash; for the latter, it's the pursuit of perfection at the expense of the good of improving education for children, largely because that goal is of secondary importance to them.]

The Times report isn’t exactly advocacy in either the inside-the-Beltway or grassroots sense. The best of journalism — including editorials and opinions — never does that anyway because reporters (and to a lesser extent, editorialists) must steer an objective, even-handed course. What the Times does do through its reporting is advocate strongly for an open, honest discussion about how we evaluate teachers, why we must move toward a system that uses value-added assessment and student test data (the best, most-objective data available), and what we must do to achieve an important component of the overall goal of improving education for all children. Only those who oppose any reform of American public education — or lack the stomach for such honest conversations — disagree with this.

School reformers, unlike reporters, don’t have any obligations to be even-handed. Judicious and thoughtful? Definitely. Sticking to the debate instead of name-calling? Definitely. But far too often, especially among Beltway reformers, the tendency is to couch conclusions and defenses of their views in starchy, academic, far-too-careful language; it is an important reason why the Beltway types struggle to converse with the very parents and community members who they need to help sustain their reforms (grassroots activists lack such timidity).  Those who proclaim they want to overhaul American public education should be as bold in their work — even embracing the steps the Times took — instead of shying timidly into the night.

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Photo courtesy of PopTech

Steve Barr probably didn’t think he was taking a new, grassroots-centered approach to school reform when he started the Green Dot collection of charter schools back in 1999. A decade later, before stepping down as chairman of the charter school operator, Barr managed to rally the city’s Latino parents to revolt against the systemic incompetence of the Los Angeles Unified School District, took control of one of the district’s dropout factories, and formed a charter school in New York City in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers that broke with traditional union work rules. He also proved that the poorest Latino children — many of whose parents are immigrants legal and otherwise — can achieve academic success, even if the Heather Mac Donalds of the world choose to think otherwise.

Barr took some time during a drive from L.A. to San Francisco to offer his thoughts on school reform, working in the grassroots on improving education, and the disconnect between Beltway-based reformers and those who work on the ground. Read, think and consider.

What is the one surprising thing you have learned during your work starting up Green Dot? How did that affect your own approach to school reform and civil rights?

The most surprising is a daily surprise. You have to challenge all preconceptions. People don’t like to talk about it, but [those preconceptions] come down to race and politics. I have yet to meet a group of people who don’t care about the conditions of education. What’s surprising to me is no matter where you from, who you are, is how intensively interested people who are about education because they love their own kids. But if you listen to people, they think that only certain people care about education. They say “you only succeed because you get only these kind of children or they have these kind of parents.

What people don’t realize is how bizarre that statement is. There are only one or two percent of people out there who don’t care about kids. But that’s not most people. Out of the 8,000 kids we have [at Green Dot], only a dozen of them are white.

When I started Green Dot, I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t married. I wasn’t even close to being married. Now that I have kids and I’m married, I get it more. I get why [Green Dot’s parents and others] are intensely interested in education. Every day, I find it reassuring that people care about improving education. It gives me hope.

Is there a disconnect between school reformers inside the Beltway and community activists – and why does it exist (if it does)?

I think it is hard to stay connected in Washington. This is why I’m loathe to go to Washington. It’s a company town. It is also an incredibly segregated town. Once you are there, it is hard to stay connected. It is also an elite class of folks. It doesn’t mean you can’t work with folks. It doesn’t mean there isn’t any good work done. It’s just that it is hard to make the connection between them and what is done out here.

How can school reformers and grassroots activists work together to improving education for poor Latino and black children?

If you truly want to improve education for the urban poor, you have to truly immerse themselves in their communities. You have to approach it with an open mind. When we open a school, we do a lot of outreach. When I go into an African-American church, I have to realize that they have been lied to by people for a lot of years. It means I have to come back there again and again and build trust. The first time, it may not go well. But that’s the work. You have to understand where people come from. Over time, you build trust with them. They will become reformers as well.

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As I have opined numerous times here and elsewhere, one of Race to the Top’s biggest flaws is that it isn’t ambitious enough. There aren’t enough players in education competing for the $3.4 billion in remaining funding; it is only a nudge toward reform not a truly bold step; and it doesn’t take advantage of the clever competition approach that has succeeded so far in getting states to take on the reforms they should have been pursuing in the first place.

What are the five steps President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should undertake in future rounds? Here are some thoughts:

• Allow school districts, charter school networks and grassroots organizations to compete in future rounds: Obama and Duncan have already said they want to allow districts to apply for Race to the Top funding. They should. Expanding the pool of Race to the Top applicants to include school districts—including reform-minded systems such as New York City and Los Angeles Unified—would force school districts to seriously change their own practices and restructure their relationships with teachers unions. Allowing districts, along with charter school organizations such as KIPP, grassroots activists and even PTAs, would also place pressure on states participating in the competition to embrace bolder reforms.
• Increase the rewards for embracing reform: Temporary funding isn’t enough. School districts must also gain additional rewards from participating and winning funding. One possible reward: Allowing winning districts to become enterprise zones of sorts, freeing them from state laws governing collective bargaining agreements and teacher dismissals.
• Parental engagement must factor into the equation: The fact that California’s Parent Trigger law, along with the expansion of charter schools, is the only tool for parental engagement emerging from Race to the Top is shameful. For the next round, the Department of Education should require applicants to enact policies and laws that place parents in their proper place as consumers and kings in education decision-making.
• Use Race funding to scale up alternative teacher training programs: Teach For America and other alternative training programs have proven they can do as good job — and particularly, with TFA, even better — than university schools of education. But there aren’t enough of them to improve the quality of school district teacher corps. Encouraging districts and charter schools to work more-closely with alternative programs (and also focus on boosting the number of men and minorities in the teaching ranks)
• Forget consensus: Contrary to proclamations from Jon Schnur and others, consensus among stakeholders is critical element of winning Race to the Top funding. It shouldn’t be. True leadership often involves breaking with those groups that refuse to move away from a crippling status quo. More importantly, school districts and state education leaders must take a more-assertive stance in their relationships with teachers unions, revamping an oft-servile relationship that yields little for students, schools and even individual teachers. Rewarding states such as Florida for taking aggressive reform measures — even if the state needs work on other elements of its application — is crucial to making Race to the Top a truly bold reform measure.

At this moment, Race to the Top is more of a nudge toward school reform that a bold leap. Considering the dropout crisis — and that 1.2 million children drop out every year into poverty and prison — nudges aren’t enough.

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Jaime Escalante exemplified what teaching should be and how any highly-effective teacher who cares about the lives of children can help kids succeed in school and life. His career showed how one man can make a difference, even when bureaucratic incompetence and even his one’s own colleagues won’t give support. And he is one reason why each of us must do better to improve the quality of education for every child, wherever they are, whoever they be, no matter their color or status at birth.

Watch this quick documentary from the Futures Channel and take his lessons to heart.

Rest In Peace, Mr. Escalante. Hope his family and friends finds peace in this time. And God Bless.

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We need more black men like Roy Jones of Call Me MISTER to work with young black men and keep them on the path to graduation and college completion. Let's make it happen.

What’s on the minds of the dropout nation today:

1. Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is certainly getting heavy play. Honestly, the book is just a step above bargain bin material from my perspective. Others feel the same way:  Cato Institute education czar Andrew Coulson notes that Ravitch offers little in the way of cogent policy analysis. She can’t comment on charter schools or vouchers because she’s education historian, not a policy analyst or a researcher of any kind. Declares he: “They should never have been given credence in the first place.” Although I will state that Coulson’s argument is a bit faulty (based on his theory, most school reformers also wouldn’t qualify), he is right to state clearly what should be known by now: Ravitch is the Evan Bayh of education policy.
2. Orestes Brownson is even more dismissive of Ravitch than Coulson or I would be. He also gives school reformers some grief: “One wishes, in vain, that education reformers would take their noses out of the test score tables and draft curriculae and talk about whether parents have a right to educate their children as they see fit… or not.” Understandable point, although I would argue that it isn’t exactly an either or. Parents should have the right to send their children to any high-quality educational options. At the same time, letting parents send children to failing schools is as much neglectful (and, dare I say, abusive) as physical abuse. There is a reasonable balance between anything goes and absolute restriction. Common core standards, from my perspective, seems unnecessary. Why? Because the National Assessment of Educational Progress already does a fine job of setting the bar for where states should be in terms of standards.
3. For a masterful historian on education, one need not go to Ravitch. There is Jeffrey Mirel, whose treatise on the failings of the comprehensive high school system should be widely read by those interested in why high schools need reform (and why ability tracking should be abandoned altogether). His book on the history of Detroit’s public schools system should also be read. One need not agree with all of his conclusions in order to appreciate his scholarship.
4. As Dropout Nation readers know, long-term pension and retiree health benefits and the evidence that seniority doesn’t equal quality are the two main forces that may lead to the end of traditional teachers compensation. Another reason why: The civil rights movement, which is now beginning to fully understand the consequences of seniority-based job protections (and the damage of “last hired-first fired” policies) to low-income students. As reported last month by the Los Angeles Times, the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the L.A. Unified School District for laying off its young teachers (and by proxy, being contractually unable to replace them with experienced teachers who don’t want to teach in schools serving poor children). At Samuel Gompers Middle School, the principal there recruited a highly-talented team of young teachers just to see them laid off; the school now depends on a rotating team of lower-quality substitutes. If the ACLU succeeds, this will result in a shock to every urban school system in the nation. And the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers will find themselves even more on the defensive.
5. In Tupelo, Miss., a group called 150 Men is teaming up with the local school district to mentor 150 young black male dropouts and get them back into school, according to WTVA. It is part of a larger effort by the district to get more black churches and fraternities to take the achievement gap and the dropout crisis as seriously as they took the fight against segregation five decades ago.
6. John Fensterwald notes that a few parent groups are asking state officials about the use of the Parent Trigger and open enrollment rules that can now be used by parents to either restructure failing schools their children attend or move them to better-performing schools in the area  (whether in their home district or outside of it). The two promising moves can help improve the quality of education for the poorest children. But as Fensterwald points out, the state hasn’t given thorough guidance on the use of either one. By the way, check out the Dropout Nation Podcast on Parent Trigger for more perspective.
7. The Common Core Standards initiative being headed up by the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers has unveiled its math and English standards for comment. Feel free to leave your comments. Checker Finn has already offered his.

Check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on next steps for Race to the Top. And read this week’s report on the possible impact of the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights efforts.

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