In Education Week’s annual report, Diplomas Count 2010, Manny Rivera addresses the use of data in identifying students early on who are in danger of slipping through the cracks.
“You begin to see signs long before 9th grade—kids who don’t have interest, and that begins to impact their attendance,” he says. “You see kids who test quite well, but who are completely not engaged in learning.”
They include some students, Rivera says, who are “inappropriately and incorrectly” labeled as having disabilities and end up languishing in special education classes.
Rivera’s organization is working to launch a graduation advancement program that will work with 7th, 8th, and 9th graders in participating districts who are over-age for their grades and behind in course credits—prime candidates for dropping out.
“There are so many young people who are in that stage,” Rivera says. “If you leave them that way, the system is going to fail them.”
The goal of the Diplomas Count 2010 report, Graduation by the Numbers—Putting Data to Work for Student Success, is to chronicle “data in action.” Education Week has combined its reporting with “new, original analysis on high school completion from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.”
The research is sobering, “particularly for minority students and those growing up in about two dozen hardscrabble communities where the odds seem stacked against graduating.
“According to the EPE Research Center’s latest analysis of high school completion for Diplomas Count, the national graduation rate stands at 68.8 percent for the class of 2007, the most recent year for which data are available. That represents a slight drop, four-tenths of a percentage point, from 69.2 percent for the previous high school class; it also marks the second consecutive year of declines in the national graduation rate, following a decade of mostly solid improvement.”
To read the full report, click here
