Category: school data

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The news about the latest release of U.S. diplomatic information by WikiLeaks has caused a global uproar, with federal and international diplomatic officials putting its founder in their respective cross-hairs for daring to inform us on matters about which we have always sort of suspected. Certainly the leaks aren’t exactly in the interest of American national security (nor does your editor support the underlying anti-American philosophy of the site itself). But in releasing the information, WikiLeaks has fulfilled two fundamental tenets at the heart of America’s democratic republicanism: That American citizens have the right to know how their government conducts its activities; and that a free press — including the ability to leak government documents — is critical to keeping government accountable to the citizenry.

One wouldn’t think American public education needs a WikiLeaks of sorts. After all, we have plenty of school data (125 data collection regimes in California alone); graduation rates and test scores are already available in one form or another. But the reality is that most school data and analysis, like national security information, is a black box of sorts, making data unavailable for easy use by parents, policymakers and even teachers and principals for making smart decisions. The kind of longitudinal, value-added analysis of student, school and teacher performance that families and school systems need to improve education is also not widely available.

Most state data systems remain difficult for even sophisticated researchers to use. Florida, Indiana and even California (whose overall data systems are neither fully longitudinal nor in great shape) are still the easiest-to-use systems for laymen even two years after I co-wrote A Byte At the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. School district data systems are generally even worse. More often than not, it’s as hard to use district Web sites out how to find something as simple as information on how to enroll in a particular school as it is to find out test and enrollment data.

When it comes to value-added data, it is even worse. As seen in the battle in October between New York City’s Department of Education and the American Federation of Teachers’ affiliate there, teachers unions will do all they can to stop any analysis of teacher performance through the use of student test data. If anything, there is clearly need for a WikiLeaks of sorts; parents should be able to know the quality of the teachers who teach their kids. And the growing evidence shows that teachers are the most-critical factor in student achievement.

One underlying problem is that education data has largely been used for complying with federal, state and local regulations, not for actual use as a consumer good. This is, in part, the natural consequences of a government-controlled system of education, and a culture that has little regard for the importance and use of data. The dysfunctional political structures of state systems of educational governance is also a culprit; as seen in California, the Progressive-era decentralization of school governance (ostensibly meant to get politics out of education) often ensures little cooperation on availing all forms of school data.

The other reason why school data remains a black box affair: The fear, especially among the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and other defenders of education’s status quo (and even among school reformers who should know better like Rick Hess) that data and analysis will be used by families and politicians to finally hold all players in education accountable for laggard instruction, turgid curriculum and antiquated practices and rules (tenure and degree- and seniority-based pay scales) that don’t actually work in fostering the cultures of genius needed to improve education. This not only can be traced back to the traditional disregard for data among education circles, but to the conceit held by many of them that education is a domain for experts alone.

This is shameful. As much as we demand parents to be actively engaged in education, we don’t provide them the data they need in order to be informed players. Just as importantly, education is as much a consumer good as it is a civil right. As the people who pay for the operation of school systems and the guardians of the customers (our kids) who must attend them, parents should have easy access to data and should have the tools needed to understand what data actually means for their kids.

School choice activists among the school reform movement should be particularly interested in making widely accessible and understandable school data a reality. Parents can’t exercise smart choices without being fully informed. Those who argue that public schools are essential to preserving the nation’s democratic republican values should also want widely-available school data. After all, you cannot make sure schools do the job of preparing kids to fulfill their economic and social destinies unless you have data. You can’t address achievement gaps or stem the nation’s dropout crisis without knowing what schools are actually doing and measuring results.

Organizations such as GreatSchools.org (whose origins date back to ratings agency Standard & Poor’s efforts a decade ago to evaluate school spending) have begun providing some useful data on school performance. The Los Angeles Times helped move the ball further earlier this year when it published value-added performance data on 5,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District; for parents and for the rest of us, it is more evidence that teachers are the most-important element in student achievement (and has shown how state laws and union collective bargaining agreements have promoted laggard instruction, desultory performance management and lax operational management within traditional districts). All these steps should be applauded and supported.

But we have not yet seen the kind of collective effort to provide deep, understandable information that WikiLeaks is now making a standard in understanding foreign policy and national security. We don’t have armies of volunteers ready to conduct value-added analysis or even build robust data systems akin to a Wikipedia. Nor do we have companies that are working to develop such systems (which would help foster a true free market for school data in the long run). We need more news outlets and school reform groups willing to challenge state laws that ban the use of student data in measuring teacher quality by actually getting the data and doing the work. The citizen’s right to know — and the importance of providing a high-quality education to every child — should be paramount.

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Inside the Beltway school data

When Will Diane Ravitch Get Her Brain Back?

RiShawn Biddle

November 30, 2010 12:00 pm November 30, 2010

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Dropout Nation usually reserves commentary on education historian-turned-thoughtless polemicist Diane Ravitch for the Twitter feed, not on these pages. As proven by folks more willing to dissect her every thought,…

Dropout Nation usually reserves commentary on education historian-turned-thoughtless polemicist Diane Ravitch for the Twitter feed, not on these pages. As proven by folks more willing to dissect her every thought, her use of data is often slipshod and her wrongheaded conclusions would be more-laughable if she wasn’t given so much credence by others who should know better. But her latest claptrap, an attempt to persuade congressional Republicans to essentially gut the No Child Left Behind Act published in the Wall Street Journal, is just too interesting to ignore. Why? Because Ravitch has seemingly lost her ability to master her career subject: The history of American public education.

The piece offers more than enough for Ravitch critics to ridicule. Just in one paragraph alone, you can take aim at the fact that she (like Linda Darling-Hammond and other opponents of standardized testing and value-added assessment-based teacher evaluations) tries to trot out Finland as an example of a country that manages to recruit top-performing collegians into teaching without considering that Finland is a much-smaller country with different economic and social traditions from the United States. You could also note that she trots out Japan and South Korea without mentioning that in those countries, students spend more time in school and teachers devote more time to instruction than their American counterparts (by the way, those conditions can be duplicated) or that South Korea actually does conduct standardized testing at a national level.

There are also her declaration that school districts are being forced to close schools and fire teaching staffs because of No Child’s accountability provisions — ignoring the fact that most school districts and states avoid using those (much-useful) prescriptions for stemming faltering performance. By the way: Obama’s School Improvement Grant program allows for other turnaround measures, which states and school districts have used instead of shutting down dropout factories and replacing teachers (as they should). Her declarative statement that value-added assessment is considered too flawed for use in evaluations by education researchers ignores the fact that this isn’t so. Such use is backed by researchers such as Eric Hanushek and institutions such as the Brookings Institution (which released a report earlier this month in support). The opposition largely comes from National Education Association-backed outfits such as the Economic Policy Institute (whose petition asking states to not use student test data in teacher evaluations counts Ravitch as one of its signatories).

The biggest problem with Ravitch’s piece is that she offers a history of the Republican Party and federal education policy that doesn’t square with the facts. While she is right in writing that the Republicans face an ideological divide on federal education policy (I’ve said this myself with greater nuance and thought), she misinterprets the role that Republicans have long played in expanding federal policy. If anything, Republicans have been as willing to expand the federal role in education decision-making when it sees fit.

It was President Dwight David Eisenhower who urged the federal government to expand its role in education and successfully advocated for passage of the first major expansion of federal education policy — the Cold War-prompted National Defense Education Act of 1958. The law was responsible for fostering the first major wave of standardized testing in the 20th century. By 1966, nearly all high school students were taking some form of standardized aptitude test, versus just one-third of students in 1958, according to a 2006 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses. Seven years later, 18 Senate Republicans would join Democrats in the upper house in supporting the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (14 Republicans, along with four Democrats, would oppose its passage).

As Chester Finn points out, it was Richard Nixon (at the urging of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the famed Coleman Report) who pushed for the earliest efforts at bringing rigor and accountability through a proposed center that eventually became the Institute for Educational Sciences. And the school reform movement would have merely remained one based in the southern states without the help of the Reagan Administration, which issued A Nation at Risk, the report on America’s education crisis that helped rally Republicans, centrist Democrats, big-city mayors and urban progressives to embrace standardized testing, charter schools, school choice and teacher quality reforms. In the most-recent two decades, Republicans have pushed for even greater expansion of the federal role in education. While the passage of No Child by a Republican-controlled Congress is the best-known example, there is also the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity school voucher program (whose revival is now being sought by Congressman Jason Chaffetz and others).

Certainly Republicans have opposed expansion of federal education policy when it didn’t suit their ideological (or political goals). After all, it was the GOP-controlled Congress that in 1995, passed budget blueprints that proposed to reduce increases in federal education and Head Start spending by $40 billion for a seven-year period and voted (in the House of Representatives) to reduce spending increases in Title I by 17 percent. The Republicans also opposed Bill Clinton’s efforts to move towards national testing and efforts to fund class-size reduction efforts. But most of that opposition was motivated not by pure ideological concerns, but by the general effort to weaken Clinton’s case for a second term in office. Once Clinton won re-election in 1996, Republican opposition to expanded federal education policy weakened substantially; by the time Bush came into office, the school reform movement had gained substantial momentum in both GOP and Democrat circles.

Given that Ravitch was a former U.S. Department of Education flunkie during the first George Bush administration, and an advocate for the very school reform policies she now opposes during those years, she should know this history well. But as typical with Ravitch these days, she engages in the kind of cherry-picking of historical facts that wouldn’t be tolerated by either an adjunct professor or an editorial page editor. The piece, like her book, is just plain shoddy.

It’s time for Ravitch to put down her pen and her Twitter feed, and get back to the books.

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school data This is Dropout Nation

Why Newark Isn’t a Success Story for Funding Equity Advocates

RiShawn Biddle

October 31, 2010 12:07 am October 31, 2010

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The problem of advocating for a mostly-discredited position is that there is no evidence to support it. The best evidence you may have to prove the point is often not…

The problem of advocating for a mostly-discredited position is that there is no evidence to support it. The best evidence you may have to prove the point is often not good enough to prove anything — especially when one looks more-closely at the example of success you tout. Sadly, in the education reform debate today, there are too many instances of this being offered by opponents of school reform (even as they declare that their opponents are engaging in simplistic debate when this isn’t so).

Such is the case of Bruce Baker, who runs the site School Finance 101, who wasn’t too happy with my critique of the NAACP and my general argument that school funding equity and adequacy suits haven’t exactly done anything to improve student achievement (or equal opportunity in education) among the poorest students. The result was a rather long bit of claptrap that danced around some issues (his attempt to argue that the school funding equity effort in Kansas City really didn’t happen is laughable and not even worth dissecting; using a length of time argument, as both Baker and Preston Green, the author of the source study the former cites, is the kind of fairytale-telling that shouldn’t be allowed in an academic text), obfuscated others (using the weak charter school environment in Kansas City as an example of charter school failure) and a headline that shows that his humor hasn’t advanced beyond the lameness of grade school. If not for the fact that it showed up on my lengthy list of incoming links (including Rick Hess’ link back to my interview with likely House Education and Labor Committee chairman John Kline), I wouldn’t have even noticed his comments.

What was interesting about Baker’s piece was his attempt to make Newark — one of the biggest recipients of school funding through the notorious (and long-running) Abbott tort — as a qualified hallmark of success. The fact that the black male graduation rate for Newark students is just trending above the educational Mendoza line of 60 percent is one example that this isn’t so. The ten percent college participation rate for the students that do graduate from Newark’s schools also shows that the district is no poster child for equity/adequacy tort success. But given the lack of evidence that can be mustered by school funding equity advocates, any small example is good enough because most people won’t look too hard at the reality.

In this case, I did. I kept it simple by looking at the ultimate evidence of student achievement: Do the kids in Newark’s schools progress from 8th grade to 12th grade (and eventually to graduation)? This matters as much (if not more) than test score results because of the nature of how most school districts operate. Thanks to the practice of social promotion, kids can pass on from grade to grade until they leave middle school even if their academic performance (including test scores, classroom grades and attendance) are in free-fall. But once a kid gets into high school, they must earn credits — that is, prove that they can actually perform — in order to graduate. The students who are doing poorly end up being stuck in ninth grade and eventually drop out.

Unfortunately for Baker, Newark proves that the additional funding from Abbott hasn’t done much to improve the district’s promoting power. Just 72 percent of the 8th-grade black males in the district’s original Class of 2009 were promoted to senior year, just half-of-one percent more than the black males in the Class of 2004; the promoting power numbers for black females barely budged (81.5 percent in 2009 versus 82 percent in 2004). Sixty-nine percent of Latino males in the Class of 2009 made it to senior year; the promoting power rate for the graduating class five years earlier was 67 percent. The Promoting Power rate for the Class of 2009 was 73 percent, two points lower than the Class of 2004.

What may be most-shocking is the Promoting Power rate for Newark’s small population of white females. For the Class of 2004, it was 73 percent; five years later, for the Class of 2009, it was 62 percent — or 11 points lower (the promotion rate for white males in both classes remained the same at around 64 percent).

These numbers are not signs of success. In fact, it’s even worse. After all, the kids from the Class of 2009 were in second grade in 1999, the same year New Jersey was ordered by the state supreme court to implement a series of measures (including high quality prekindergarten programs) to ensure that children in Newark and other Abbott districts would receive school funding equal and adequate to kids in the suburbs. Essentially, it didn’t matter how much additional money was poured into Newark schools; the results remain as dismal as ever. (This said, the numbers could prove to be different for the Classes of 2010 through 2012, who just began school when Abbott funding kicked in. As a thoughtful reporter and researcher, I’ll at least say that.)

In offering up Newark as a prime example of success, Baker further discredited the school funding equity/adequacy theory. Baker would better-serve our kids if he dropped this theory — which has done more for the pockets of the lawyers, consultants and advocacy center executive directors who promote it than for the children it is supposed to help — and actually worked on the complex and myriad systemic issues that are behind the dropout crisis that is condemning so many of Newark’s kids to poverty and prison. This isn’t to say that spending money for such things as enriched pre-kindergarten is a bad thing (I would dare say that doing so as part of improving student achievement for the long term makes sense). But tossing more money into a system that perpetuates mediocrity through low teacher quality, abysmal curricula, and standards that lack rigor doesn’t work. It will take a full reform of American public education — including how teachers are recruited and trained, and the end of seniority rules — in order to make sure that our poorest children get the high-quality education they deserve.

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Giving Parents Power school data teacher quality Uncategorized

AFT to New York City Parents: You Have No Right to Know

RiShawn Biddle

October 26, 2010 12:00 pm October 26, 2010

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You can’t say you want to improve the quality of education for all children — especially our poorest children — and then deny families and taxpayers the information they need…

http://gothamschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/010510-uft-class-size-lawsuit.jpg

Michael Mulgrew is to NYC parents what Gerald Ford was to Big Apple politicians.

You can’t say you want to improve the quality of education for all children — especially our poorest children — and then deny families and taxpayers the information they need to help make this a reality. You can’t say that parent power and parental engagement is critical to student achievement and then argue that school districts shouldn’t provide critical information for such engagement (and decision-making). And you can’t call your organization a union of professionals and yet be unwilling to submit your members to the kind of performance management to which other professions are subjected.

Let’s be clear: The opposition of the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City to (and lawsuit against) the release of Value-Added-based teacher ratings by the New York City Department of Education makes clear that it believes that parents (and taxpayers) don’t really have the right to know which teachers are highly-effective or not — and therefore, no right to demand that their children receive a high-quality education. It doesn’t support assuring that families are kings (and lead decision-makers) in education. It really doesn’t want to take all the steps needed — and use all the tools available — to improve the teaching profession and the quality of education for our kids. And it (along with his fellow AFT and NEA locals) cannot make an effective case against using Value-Added in teacher evaluations. It’s really that simple.

Now, don’t think for a moment the release of this information will, in itself, spur the revolutionary reform we need in American public education. The problems are to systemic for just one solution to work. But, as New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein argues, why wouldn’t we want to elevate high-quality teachers as models of good-to-great teachers and get poor-performing teachers out the classroom?

By the Way: As for folks such as Alexander Russo who insist that the papers who requested this information, let’s make this clear: It is no more unethical than the release of government employee salary data which, for most of us, is a lot more uncomfortable and personal. The ratings don’t reveal any disciplinary data or other information that actually would be sensitive. It is the rating of teacher effectiveness and performance, which, like salary data, should be available to the public so they can make informed decisions. More importantly, as reporters and editorialists, our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted — and last I checked, teachers receive benefits and compensation that make them quite comfortable.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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Building A Culture of Genius school data This is Dropout Nation

The Kahlenberg Crowd Gets It Wrong Again

RiShawn Biddle

October 22, 2010 10:56 am October 22, 2010

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One of the biggest flaws of the school integration crowd (most-notably, Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation) is that they see the low quality of education for our poor and…

Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

One of the biggest flaws of the school integration crowd (most-notably, Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation) is that they see the low quality of education for our poor and minority children as a symptom of poverty and segregation (voluntary and otherwise), not as a consequence of the systemic problems within American public education. From where they sit, the idea of improving the quality of schools in the neighborhoods where the children live (including long-term reforms in teacher quality, structural overhauls, and expansion of charter schools and vouchers) is dismissed almost out of hand. They essentially argue that these communities should be left behind and that the poor do not deserve equality of opportunity for high-quality schools. They are also buying into a myth that kids can’t learn if they are mired in a so-called “culture of poverty.”

The latest example of this myopic vision comes courtesy of the latest report coming out of Century, Housing Policy is School Policy. If one only listened to Kahlenberg’s talking points and read the Washington Post story, one would think that the report shows clear evidence that the latest integrationist solution — the use of public housing policies such as those implemented in Montgomery County, Md., the test case in the report — is better-suited than other reform formulas (it also dovetails nicely with that other approach embraced by Kahlenberg and company — magnet schools and a limited form of public school choice).

But a closer read of the report, written by Rand Corp. researcher Heather Schwartz offers a much-different argument. If anything, it seems that the line of thinking dismisses the actual (strong) research that shows the need for systemic reform. Schwartz’s data shows clearly that poor kids attending Montgomery’s best-performing schools are more-likely than to succeed academically than poor kids relegated to the district’s worst-performing (and poorly-managed) schools. The problem, however, isn’t so much the data or methodology, but the lens through which Schwartz and her colleagues see it. Immediately as one reads through the report, Schwartz has clearly stalked a position that it if poor kids are moved out of cultures of poverty into middle-class settings where there are “decreasing stress levels…[and] increased access to positive role models.” But as the report itself bares out, simply placing poor kids into classrooms with their middle-class schoolmates isn’t all that effective. Admits Schwartz: “the acadenic returns from economic integration diminish as school poverty levels rose.”

The reason for this is pretty simple. Schwartz (and Kahlenberg) make the mistake of arguing that correlation — that is, the tendency of schools in poor communities to be low-quality — is causation. One can see this is so just by looking at the strong academic results of schools serving mostly-poor communities and children run by charter school operators such as the Knowledge is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, Roman Catholic diocesan schools (including those in Montgomery County), and high-performing urban schools. So why are the KIPPs of the world succeeding with poor students (and in these poor communities) — and why are districts such as Montgomery County failing (except when they move kids into their better schools)? Because the former are doing the basics: Ensuring that kids are taught by high-quality teachers with strong subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial drive and care for every child in their class; strong school leadership from talented, savvy principals and system leaders; a culture of genius in which all children are considered capable of learning even the most-difficult of subjects; strong parental engagement in school decision-making; and a rigorous college preparatory curricula.

Traditional school districts struggle to deliver high-quality curricula to even its middle-class students — and do even worse for poor and minority students. One reason: Seniority assignment and other work rules that allow for more-senior teachers to move into what they consider to be better assignments (usually in magnets and schools serving middle-class families); so schools serving poor students suffer higher levels of turnover (a problem that would be abated if a better job was done in recruiting and training teachers), and end up warehousing laggard veterans as part of the “dance of the lemons” that occurs in districts every year. As Robert Manwaring of the Education Sector has also pointed out, those very seniority rules also means that schools serving poor kids suffer adversely when districts lay off more-energetic, less-senior teachers as part of “last hired-first fired” policies. (Oddly enough, Schwartz concedes some of this on page 10 of the report. But she moves on to justifying her hypothesis.)

The fact that poor parents are treated as afterthoughts and nuisances by principals and teachers almost guarantees low levels of parental engagement, further fueling low academic achievement. The lack of high-quality school options in poor neighborhoods is also a factor; restrictions on the expansion of charter schools, the lack of vouchers, and the lack of intra- and inter-district choice (thanks to the practice of zoning kids into neighborhoods) means that poor families (who cannot buy their ways into better neighborhoods) are stuck with dropout factories and academic failure mills.

What integration advocates should be doing is addressing the systemic failures within education and embracing an array of approaches — including, yes, magnet schools, along with charters and better school data systems — that expand educational options for poor families and improve teacher quality, curricula and other aspects of education. Instead, they continue to embrace a philosophy that only serves to mire our poorest children in academic failure.

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school data This is Dropout Nation

This is Dropout Nation: America’s Truancy Problem: The L.A. County Example

RiShawn Biddle

September 16, 2010 11:02 am September 16, 2010

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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…

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.)

A PORTRAIT OF TRUANCY: SAN GABRIEL UNIFIED

School	Enrollment*	Number of Students with UnexcusedAbsence or Tardy on 3 or More Days (truants)	Truancy Rate
School	Enrollment*		Truancy Rate
Coolidge Elementary	385	197	51.17%
Del Mar High	69	102	147.83%
Gabrielino High	1,794	1,535	85.56%
Jefferson Middle	1,239	691	55.77%
Mckinley Elementary	712	210	29.49%
Roosevelt Elementary	415	203	48.92%
Washington Elementary	458	241	52.62%
Wilson Elementary	367	161	43.87%
San Gabriel Unified District	5,439	3,340	61.41%

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.

A PROFILE OF TRUANCY: LYNWOOD UNIFIED

School	Enrollment*	Number of Students with Unexcused Absence or Tardy on 3 or More Days (truants)	Truancy Rate
School	Enrollment*		Truancy Rate
Cesar Chavez Middle	976	791	81.05%
Helen Keller Elementary	621	249	40.1%
Hosler Middle	1,159	1,011	87.23%
Janie P. Abbott Elementary	676	247	36.54%
Lincoln Elementary	644	176	27.33%
Lindbergh Elementary	784	179	22.83%
Lugo Elementary	492	218	44.31%
Lynwood High	3,152	3,137	99.52%
Lynwood Middle	1,648	1,450	87.99%
Marco Antonio Firebaugh High	1,875	863	46.03%
Mark Twain Elementary	616	197	31.98%
Pathway Independent Study	84	10	11.9%
Roosevelt Elementary	540	196	36.3%
Rosa Parks Elementary	626	99	15.81%
Thurgood Marshall Elementary	673	260	38.63%
Vista High (Continuation)	314	101	32.17%
Washington Elementary	786	198	25.19%
Will Rogers Elementary	769	190	24.71%
Wilson Elementary	586	102	17.41%
Lynwood Unified District	17,021	9,674	56.84%

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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