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.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why one must stop thinking about big cities as being the only epicenters of the dropout crisis and the nation’s crisis of low educational achievement. While Detroit and other major urban areas are often associated with systemic academic failure, small cities such as Hammond, Ind., and Alexandria, Va., along with rural communities, suburbs and exurbs also struggle with dropouts.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. And the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

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As the pioneering researcher who developed the Promoting Power Index of measuring high school academic failure and the man who coined the term ‘”dropout factories“, Robert Balfanz knows all too well about how the nation’s worst public schools retard the educational destinies of the children who attend them. From his perspective, it is as critical to turn around these schools as it is to deal with other causes of racial-, ethnic- and gender-based achievement gaps.

Watch this video of Balfanz’s testimony before the House Education and Labor Committee earlier this year on the need to reform the worst high schools (you can watch other HEL videos at the majority leadership’s YouTube page. And pay attention to his most-important point of all: Improving the quality of American public education — and helping all children achieve their fullest potential — isn’t insurmountable. It can be done — and it should.

You can also watch other Dropout Nation videos on YouTube.

Given the array of plays on the Indiana U.S. Senator’s name — including some of my own reports — I’ll shy away from the pile-on amid his decision to end his re-election bid. But Bayh’s exit does give one pause about the role he has played, not only in American politics (and especially in the Hoosier State), but in helping to re-shape how the nation measures academic performance and emphasizes rigor and data over guesswork and academic failure.

For the most part, Bayh’s role in this was incidental. Save for championing some odd policy or two, education was an afterthought for him. The earliest school reform efforts came before Bayh’s tenure as Indiana Governor in the late 1980s thanks to a group that included then-state superintendent H. Dean Evans and future state House Republican leader Brian Bosma.  The most direct impact he had on education wasn’t even on  policy itself, but on a move back in the mid-1990s to address the state’s perpetual deficit in its teachers pension. Although Bayh and his main successor, Frank O’Bannon, helped decided to use funds from the Hoosier Lottery to pay down those deficits and fully fund the pension, it didn’t work. Indiana’s teachers pension is currently $10 billion under water.

One indirect legacy lies not with Bayh himself, but with his onetime chief of staff, Bart Peterson. After becoming Indianapolis’ first Democrat mayor in four decades, Peterson struck a blow for school reform and school choice when he successfully battled his fellow Democrats in Indiana’s statehouse to become the first mayor in the nation to authorize charter schools. Whatever Peterson’s other flaws as a politician (namely a lack of focus on quality-of-life issues), he remains a pathbreaker in education reform through his founding of the Mind Trust, one of the leading incubators of education reform solutions in the nation.

Bayh’s most-important school reform legacy was rather incidental. It came during his last two years  in the governor’s office when he appointed one of his aides, a former state legislator (and onetime candidate for state schools superintendent) by the name of Stan Jones, to the state’s Commission for Higher Education. At the time, the agency did little more than serve as the sounding board for the state’s higher ed policymaking and presenting budgets to the legislature.  What Jones managed to do over the next 13 years set the path for how education policymakers — both in the Hoosier State and throughout the nation — should approach systemic reform.

Even before the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, Jones was among the first to call for reform of the state’s high school graduation rate calculation, which had been so inaccurate for so long that perpetual failing school districts such as Indianapolis Public Schools were allowed to post graduation rates of 95 percent and higher (even when it was more likely that they were graduating a mere 50 percent of freshman in four years). Not only did Jones call for replacing the old graduation rate calculation with a new one, with the help of one editorial board (on which I served) and a smattering of state leaders, Jones spent much of his tenure battling school districts, his fellow Democrats and even the state’s longtime education superintendent (and longtime foe) Suellen Reed to make it happen.

More importantly, along with the state’s Chamber of Commerce and Derek Redelman (a once-and-future Chamber executive who once, oddly enough, helped Reed beat Jones in winning the superintendent’s job), Jones began rallying state officials — including Bayh’s successor, Frank O’Bannon, Joe Kernan and Mitch Daniels — and business leaders to begin addressing Indiana’s most-pressing educational issues. He helped transform a politically-driven state college into a network of community colleges where high school graduates who weren’t ready for the rigors of Indiana University and Purdue could get prepared.  He began addressing the reality that the Hoosier State — home to the university that hosts the nation’s second-largest foreign student population (and another whose international tentacles extend into Asia) — couldn’t even assure that more than a quarter of its high schoolers were attending college.

These days, Jones is working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to address the nation’s problems of low college attendance and completion. But his past work has an impact far in Indiana and beyond. These days, state schools superintendent Tony Bennett — who may be the most-successful state schools chief executive in the nation — has to thank Jones for paving the way for Bennett’s own efforts to address teacher quality and end social promotion. Outside of Indiana, the work on graduation rates — along with the pioneering research of Jay P. Greene, Robert Balfanz and Christopher Swanson — is the underlying reason why President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top effort is gaining traction.

Bayh hasn’t exactly done much since on education policy. He hasn’t even been much of a presence in the debate over No Child or Race to the Top. But let’s give him credit for picking the men who cared about school reform and improving the lives of America’s children.

Young black males need the teaching so they can learn and succeed.

What’s happening in the dropout nation these days:

1. National Journal is hosting the latest of their weekly questions about education. This week, it is all about whether the No Child Left Behind Act will be reauthorized this year. I have offered my thoughts in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast.
2. The president’s budget “freeze” doesn’t include education (of course). Education research also fairs well (according to EdWeek), alongside plans to fund charter schools that follow the Harlem Children’s Zone model (notes Tom Marshall). The Department of Education offers up its series of justifications for its spending priorities.
3. What role does school choice play in housing prices. Eric Bruner and his colleagues say that choice-based enrollment policies across all school districts (inter-district) and within them can bring home price and income stability to surrounding neighborhoods. Which may prove the value of school choice of all kinds public and private.
4. Meanwhile in D.C., schools boss Michelle Rhee isn’t exactly polling well, at least according to Bill Turque and Jon Cohen at the Washington Post. Some of it, of course, has to do with Rhee’s PR gaffes and general demeanor. But let’s get real: It is also about some more-unmentionable matters and also about the fact that Rhee is ending D.C. Public Schools’ role as the District’s jobs program and patronage system. This isn’t going to make the adults happy (even if it helps improve the educational opportunities of the kids who actually have to sit in the district’s classrooms).
5. Jay Mathews, of course, makes no secret of his opinion of Rhee. Whether he thinks she’ll last beyond her current term? He’s not so sure. My opinion: It will depend on whether Adrian Fenty — just as unpopular as Rhee for reasons of his own creation — doesn’t draw strong primary and general election opposition. If he doesn’t, Rhee stays. But if he does…
6. In Southern California, L.A. Unified’s school choice reform is mired in squabbling, with accusations of  favoritism being tossed around by the district’s AFT local, according to the L.A. Daily News. Meanwhile the L.A. Times editorial board is disappointed by all the other problems emerging from the districts handling of the bidding process for the 30 schools offered for the first round of reform.
7. John Fensterwald notes a recent report on school district finances within the Golden State. Federal stimulus funds may have staved off fiscal belt-tightening for now, according to Fensterwald, but those funds are running out — which means more thoughtful approaches to operations.
8. In New York City, the local NAACP sues the city’s Department of Education over its shutdown of failing schools, according to Gothamist. As usual, NAACP attempts to strike a blow over the wrong issue — and failing black children in the process.
9. EducationNews re-runs one of Martin Haberman’s fine pieces on how to train teachers for urban school settings. Enjoy.
10. In Education Leadership, Eric Sparks, Janet L. Johnson and Patrick Ackos discuss using data in determining which students are at risk for dropping out. They look at 9th-grade performance. But they fail to mention Robert Balfanz’s innovative work in the early dropout indicators arena.
11. What is dropout nation: Tiny Schuylkill County, Pa., which has high levels of high school dropouts, according to a study cited in the Standard Speaker. The source of the data, Census sampling, may be unreliable for actually measuring the number of dropouts and graduates. But it gives some sense of the problems within Pennsylvania’s coal country.
12. Kevin Carey takes shots at EdWeek for a report on a for-profit college industry study. Certainly, Carey is no fan of University of Phoenix’s of the world for reasons both good and specious. You go figure out where you stand.

And you can check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, this on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Enjoy.

A reason defenders of traditional public education oppose standardized testing and other data collection is that the information (in their view) yields little usable information, either for helping students or schools. But in this clip from Monday’s Alliance for Excellent Education confab, Ruth Curran Neild, who, along with her fellow Johns Hopkins researcher (and Promoting Power Index creator) Robert Balfanz, offers more reasons why data can be so useful. Dropout factories are not only alike in so many ways, but the underlying causes are so easy to measure.