Education Week - November 30, 2016 - 7

Many Students 'Stop Out' of High School, Studies Show

The Every Student Succeeds Act
did not renew programs in previous iterations of federal education
law that were dedicated entirely to
high school dropout prevention and
re-engagement. But ESSA does require that state plans explain how
they will address high dropout rates
among migrant, American Indian,
and Alaska Native young people,
and support or re-engage students
from those groups who have left
school.
The law also created studentsupport and academic-enrichment
grants, which states and districts
can use for dropout prevention and
re-engagement, among other purposes, although the grants have not
yet been funded.
Building students' academic expectations for themselves early
might help. Nationwide, NCES data
showed that, among the leavers, the
students who had said in 9th grade
that they expected to get a college
degree were five times more likely
to return after dropping out than to
stay out permanently.
"It's not enough to just look at
the last six months to understand
why a student dropped out; it's a
cumulative process. When students dropped out, it was really
both a conscious choice that you
are not coming back, but it is also
a gradual process of absenteeism," Ximenes Barrat said. "Leaving school was the culmination of

The researchers found that the later
students "stopped out" of school, the
less likely they were to graduate and
the more likely they were to become
dropouts.

Utah Examined

2,500
30

2,000
1,500

1,000
10
500

SOURCE: WestEd analysis of Utah State Office of Education
data for 2007-08 to 2010-11

years of struggling and missing
school and not being able to keep
up. And then when you re-enroll, it
is even more difficult to catch up."
For example, the national data
found that returning students were
still more likely than students who
had never dropped out to miss school
frequently.

Number of dropouts
Re-enrollment rate (percent)

3,000

2008-09

2007-08

2009-10

2010-11

School year of first dropout event

were proficient in English. After
leaving, only 17 percent of those
ELLs returned, compared with 22
percent of the English-proficient
students who stopped out.
Moreover, the rate of returning
students dropped significantly for
those who left school in higher
grades. Ximenes Barrat found
more than 12 percent of dropouts
tried to come back to school repeat-

edly, only to drop out again.
"We see those students passing
classes, earning credits-just not
enough to graduate," Ximenes Barrat said. Generally, Utah students
who left school repeatedly never
accumulated more than 10 to 15
credits-roughly what the on-time
graduates had accumulated by
their sophomore years.
Ultimately, fewer than 1 in 3

students who returned to school
graduated within six years. "Supporting kids when they are back
in school is a totally different
ballgame than supporting them
when they are out," Ximenes Barrat said. "They are a struggle for
the school system as a whole, but
they are here and giving themselves a second chance, so there is
an opportunity to support them."

In the Utah study, 19 percent of
the more than 41,000 students who
entered high school in the 2007-08
school year left school at some point.
More than 40 percent of those students later re-enrolled in their original school or another public school in

Dropping out is not a
final event. ...There is
still a lot we can do
besides saying, 'Oh,
they've dropped out-
it's over.'"
VANESSA XIMENES BARRAT
Senior Research Analyst, WestEd

the state.
The Utah study's findings mirrored those at the national level.
Students in poverty were at higher
risk of leaving school, for example-but they also re-enrolled in
school more often than the state
average.
Black and Pacific Islander students and those still learning to
speak English had both higher
rates of leaving school and lower
rates of returning than the state
average. For English-learners, the
problem was particularly stark:
45 percent of English-learners in
Utah left school, compared with
only 17 percent of students who

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Federal Support

Of the 41,000 Utah students who started
high school during the 2007-08 school
year, nearly 20 percent left school at some
point that year, according to a study
by researchers from WestEd. More than
40 percent of those students later reenrolled in their original school or some
other school in the state.

50%

for Education

For many students, dropping out of
high school isn't the end of the line
but a "stop out" along the path to a
diploma, new federal and state data
suggest.
Of the students who entered high
school in 2009, fewer than 3 percent were no longer in school when
researchers from the National Center for Education Statistics' High
School Longitudinal Study checked
in 2012. But nearly 7 percent of the
2009 freshmen had "stopped out"-
left school for four weeks or more at
some point in grades 9-11, only to
have returned by 2012.
The federal study found that students in the poorest 20 percent of
families nationwide were generally
more likely than those from other
income groups to both stop out or
drop out. They were more than
twice as likely to stop school briefly,
12.2 percent versus 4.7 percent who
left school permanently.
"Dropping out is not a final event.
... There is still a lot we can do besides saying, 'Oh, they've dropped
out-it's over,' " said Vanessa
Ximenes Barrat, a senior research
analyst at the research group
WestEd who led a similar new study
of dropout and re-engagement rates
in Utah. "What this shows is we also
need to turn an eye to when those
dropouts come back to school."

3,500

n Thibodeaux

By Sarah D. Sparks

WHAT HAPPENS TO STUDENTS
WHO LEAVE SCHOOL?

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Education Week - November 30, 2016

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