A new Web site that went live today has no shortage of stats and pretty charts about California youth and higher education: high school graduation trends, completion of a-g requirements in high school, by gender; college enrollment trends; community college completion rates for degree-seekers, etc.

Measuring Success, Making Progress — as the site is called — is funded by the Hewlett Foundation.

What do you make of the information? Does any of it surprise you?

I was struck by the dropoff in the 12th grade between the number of kids who enrolled as seniors and those who received a diploma. ( This was among group of kids whose enrollment was tracked since they were seventh-graders in 2002.)

You can find a flier for the event here. Pre-register here or call (510) 238-7906.

If you look around, you’ll see adult education coming apart, piece by piece. That was the message teachers, students and administrators gave state politicians this morning at a forum in Richmond.

Not only were adult ed programs cut by 22 percent this year, but this spring, the state Legislature gave school districts the go-ahead to spend the money as they wished.

Faced with huge budget shortfalls, districts have been doing just that. According to a new survey taken by the California Council for Adult Education, 85 percent of Bay Area school districts have used at least some adult ed money to balance their 2009-10 books.

Alameda and Contra Costa counties alone are serving 15,000 fewer students this fall as a result of all of these cutbacks, according to the council.

Adult education classes include English, basic literacy, GED, high school diploma, parenting and career tech. Historically, they provided enrichment and fitness programs for older adults and training programs for the disabled, though many of those classes were eliminated this year.

So far, Oakland school officials haven’t dipped into the adult ed pot. But like other districts, OUSD’s fiscal stresses have been temporarily eased by federal stimulus aid. In the coming months, the school district will have to cut $27 million from its 2010-2011 budget, making it harder to leave that fund (about $11.5 million or more of state money, according to its director) untouched.

What should happen next? At today’s forum, several people stressed that adult schools serve a much different need than community colleges (which are also under a great deal of strain), and cautioned against merging the two systems.

Brigitte Marshall, director of Oakland Career and Adult Education, says the answer might be to separate adult schools from school districts and to create a structure similar to that of a Regional Occupational Program.

“We have to start the conversation now about what the system should look like,” she said. “If that means a completely different funding mechanism and a completely different structure, then so be it.”

What do you think?

This is not set in stone — the budget still has to make it through the Assembly and Senate — but it’s unlikely that a cut already agreed to by the Dems (six of the 10 budget conference committee members are Democrats) will be restored under these fiscal conditions.

This means, of course, that next year’s juniors and seniors who have yet to pass both portions of the test would be off the hook. Sophomores would still take the test, but if they fail, it wouldn’t count against them, and they wouldn’t have to retake it.

State Superintendent Jack O’Connell is a huge supporter of the CAHSEE, which went into effect for the Class of 2006 and tests students on low-level math and 10th-grade reading concepts. He issued a release saying:

“The budget conference committee’s decision today is a huge setback for California students. The implementation of the California High School Exit Exam is the greatest high school reform effort we have made in a generation. The argument that our expectations should be lowered because of budget cuts to public education heaps insult on injury to students and teachers who are being impacted by the budget crisis. I guarantee that businesses in our state and around the world are not lowering expectations for their employees. This exam helps focus attention and resources on students who are struggling. We will do a grave injustice to our students if we do not ensure that they have the minimal skills needed to survive in the increasingly competitive global economy.

Not everyone shares O’Connell’s zeal for the test. Most recently, a Stanford University study that analyzed the graduation rates of struggling students of all ethnicities found that the exam hurt girls and non-white students the most.

Do you agree with the committee’s decision? You can find all of the committee’s actions so far, here.

“Where is the outrage?” the moderator, CCJ Director Mark Carter, kept asking the journalists.

Carter wondered whether we thought readers might care more about the largely uneducated populace if the problem was linked to broader issues connected to it, such as America’s global competitiveness, the regional economy, taxes, or crime.

Do you sense that the public is, in fact, outraged about Oakland’s dropout rate (about 28 percent, according to the latest state report, and higher by other measures), or that they’ve come to expect such statistics from urban school districts?

Or is the bigger question the quality of high schools in general, and how they are preparing all students?

If you take the data at face value, the Oakland school district is well on its way to solving one of its most serious challenges: From one year to the next, its estimated high school dropout rate fell from 36 percent to 28 percent.

So I called Karl Scheff, who manages the Educational Demographics Office at the California Department of Education, and asked what we should make of this swing.

“It’s a pretty big jump,” he said, after a pause. Then Scheff explained that districts are becoming more familiar with the new system — meaning that they are sending the state more accurate “exit codes” each time a student leaves a school.

If that’s true, and the latest estimates are more accurate, then maybe it’s good news after all. Well, relatively speaking. These new figures show that 35 percent of the district’s African-American high school students (down from 40 percent) and 27 percent of its Latino high school students (down from 37 percent) quit school early. 

I put together a spreadsheet that compares last year’s estimates, by school (based on what happened during the 2006-07 school year) and this year’s (based on 2007-08 data). You can find it here. Look for the huge differences at some Oakland schools, such as Youth Empowerment School, Oakland Tech and MetWest High School. The new estimates are in blue font.

DATA NOTES: The year-to-year differences listed in Column H, though in percentage format, are percentage point differences, not percent changes. Also: Students who enroll in an adult school, or who take more than four years to graduate, are not counted as dropouts in this system. Middle school dropouts are counted, but they are not included in the overall dropout estimate.

image from mario zucca illustration’s site at flickr.com/creativecommons

By this same formula, Oakland’s four-year graduation rate for the Class of 2005 was about 50.5 percent, about nine percentage points higher than it was for the Class of 1995 (and about three points higher than the estimate cited in the “dropout factory” report), according to the new study, prepared by Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

The America’s Promise report, which looked at the 50 largest cities in the United States, ranked Oakland 34th. It also found that most of Oakland’s dropouts quit in the tenth grade, something that I hadn’t realized. You can find the study here.

I should note that the last group studied was the Class of 2005, the year before California’s high school exit exam requirement took effect (see this morning’s post). Improvement’s a good thing, but half is still half.

Looking at four California school districts, researchers analyzed the graduation rates and other data for kids who tested poorly (in the bottom fourth of all students) on standardized reading and math tests that they took earlier, in the eighth and ninth grades.

The study compared what happened to those low-performing students in the Class of 2005 — before the new graduation requirement took effect — with similar students at the same schools in the classes of 2006 and 2007. 

The study found that girls and non-white students fared the worst as a result of the policy change. The graduation rates of the academically struggling black students and girls in the study dropped 19 percentage points after the requirement kicked in, compared to just 1 percentage point for struggling white students and 12 points for boys, according to the report.

Other findings? Little evidence that the high school exit exam is causing kids to drop out of school, as feared, or that it’s raising academic achievement, as hoped. It is, however, causing graduation rates to dip, overall. The study estimates that 3.6 to 4.5 percent of California students — up to 22,500 a year — don’t graduate because of this new policy.

State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who championed the exit exam, quickly issued a news release in response to the study, saying:

… The heart of this report speaks to why I’ve called out California’s racial achievement gap and why I am so committed to implementing the14 recommendations made by my P-16 Council aimed at closing these gaps. The recommendations include the creation of a statewide strand of culturally relevant pedagogy and a culture survey of our students and education staff to discuss and address issues of unconscious racial bias in our schools.

I believe that the biggest mistake we could make is to view this report as a reason to lower our expectations for any student, but especially for our students of color and females. While reports like this call for us to redouble our efforts to improve instruction and effective interventions, I remain wholly committed to maintaining a high standard of expectations for all students. As a result, I have asked my staff and HumRRO, the CAHSEE evaluator, to conduct further review of the study so we can look for ways to better meet the educational needs of all students and help them succeed in school, on the CAHSEE, and in life.

But the report recommends that California “explore new ways to improve education and hold our high schools accountable for the academic achievement of their students without the negative and inequitable effects of the exit exam.”

Do you think California should keep this requirement intact? Does the study convince you otherwise?

photo from luminafoundation’s photostream at flickr.com/creativecommons

The report also projects that the drop in dropout rate would give the city an extra $144 million in “lifetime economic benefits.” You can find the one-page city profile here, and info for 16 other cities including Berkeley and San Francisco here.

Oakland’s dropout rate, according to the latest estimates by the California Department of Education, is about 36 percent. What would it take to cut that in half?

image from kimberlyfaye’s site on flickr.com/creativecommons

California schools don’t have enough funding and they provide “inadequate and unequal learning conditions and opportunities,” according to the latest annual report by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

The report is more of an advocacy piece than a research analysis, but it does raise (and answer, in no uncertain terms) important questions about the state of public education in California — its class sizes, course offerings, college-going rates, graduation rates, among other measures. 

Researchers compiled a fact sheet on Oakland Unified, as well (I found at least one typo — I’m sure there are more than 174 middle school students in the city).

Did any of the authors’ findings come as a surprise? Do you agree with their conclusions?