More on Tacoma High Schools

A big AP story was making the rounds yesterday about the drop-out rates at Washington high schools.

It certainly did not paint a good picture of Tacoma education as it contained this quote, “Every comprehensive high school in Tacoma made the [dropout factory] list, but none in Seattle or Spokane did.”

Ouch.

Their list includes Foss, Lincoln, Mt. Tahoma, Stadium, and Wilson. It was assembled by comparing the size of the freshman classes for 2004 – 2006 with the size of the senior class that graduated.

So for example, the Class of 2006 at Foss started with 675 students, but the total graduating class size was 322, or 49% of the original class. Hence—according to the study—the label of “drop-out factory” for Foss.

According to the data that informed the AP report, out of the 5 schools, Wilson ranked highest graduation rate with 56% and Lincoln was the lowest with 32%.

There is at least one point worth considering that might alleviate some of the bad news, and that’s the students in the Tacoma School of the Arts cannot enter the school until after their freshman year at another high school. Out of the 430 students at SOTA, about 80% come from one of the other 5 Tacoma high schools and the rest from out of the district.

That means that (roughly) 344 students would be on the books at a Tacoma high school but transfered out to SOTA where they would spend the remainder of their 3 years. Doing some math on a napkin, we figure that the school district graduation average would probably increase about 4% (to around a 48% graduation rate) if you count those students.

We’re not saying that’s a big bump, but before jumping all over the School District and calling the high schools drop-out factories, we think it’s worth looking into local circumstances that might affect the numbers. The state measures the graduation rate for Tacoma at 67.5% leaving a big gap between the state numbers and the Johns Hopkins research numbers, so clearly something’s going on.

The Tribune today has some reactions from School District leaders with some information on how they calculate enrollment that might also affect the numbers.

What do you think? Is it your experience that Tacoma high schools are “drop-out factories?” Are there other causes that might explain what’s going on in Tacoma? And if we really are losing so many students, what can we do to help?

Johns Hopkins University did the research that informed the article, and if you’re interested you can learn more about the whole project and the methodology on their website.