Dropout Rates Still Plague Public Schools

By: Rui KaneyaChanel Polk knew the grim statistics all too well. All around her, people were dropping out of high school because of pregnancy or simply a lack of interest, while others figured they were better off working. But Polk, 18, hung in.

"You saw what happened to those people when you saw them on the street," Polk said. "That encouraged me to stay. No matter what, I was going to go to school."

Last June Polk graduated from Calumet High School, at 8131 S. May St. on Chicago’s South Side. And she got a firsthand look at how she had defied the odds. Of the nearly 400 students who entered Calumet in 1993, barely 100 were in her graduation class, she said. Polk is now a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Calumet’s condition illustrates one of the most serious problems facing the city’s public high schools, The Chicago Reporter has found. Overall dropout rates hovered around 43 percent for the graduating classes of 1993, 1994 and 1995, the last years for which statistics from the Chicago Board of Education are available.

And an additional 15 percent of those students transferred out of the system. In all, 31,840 of 75,248 students graduated with their original freshman class.

The statistics challenge the Board’s efforts to turn around its high schools, said Fred Hess, director of the Center for Urban School Policy at Northwestern University. "The constant transition of students ends up slowing down the curriculum," he said.

To remedy the condition, the Board is focusing on strict accountability measures, including probation and reconstitution, and mandatory summer school and extended days, said Powhatan Collins, director of the Department of High School Reorganization.

High dropout rates have long plagued Chicago schools. In the May 1980 story, "School System Abandons Dropouts as Rate Hits 55 Percent," reporter Sharon Gelder (now McGowan) revealed that more than half the students who entered high school in the late 1970s never graduated. The class of 1979 recorded a 55 percent dropout rate.

School officials complained the data were skewed because it included students who transferred but may have graduated elsewhere. But officials could not separate those students from the dropouts.

"Initially we took a lot of flack," McGowan recalled. "But then U.S. News and World Report published a dropout story that used the same method as the Reporter."

Today the Board has a better grasp on its record keeping, but its 43 percent dropout rate remains far above the nationwide average of 10.8 percent in 1992, the last year statistics are available from the U.S. Department of Education.

In 1995, 25 high schools recorded a dropout rate of greater than 50 percent. Phillips Academy, at 244 E. Pershing Road, recorded the highest at 71.8 percent.

Blacks posted the highest rate—45.1 percent, followed by 42.3 percent for Latinos and whites at 38.3 percent. But a higher percentage of whites transfer out of the system.

Twenty-five high schools with at least a 50 percent dropout rate in 1995 had an average poverty rate of 82.5 percent, compared to 75.1 percent systemwide. The nine schools with less than a 30 percent dropout rate had a 59 percent poverty rate.

But some schools offer hope. Kelly High School, 4136 S. California Ave., reduced its 74.4 percent dropout rate in 1989 to 33.8 percent in 1995. Kelly is 85 percent minority and 91 percent low income.

"It used to be that the school was looked upon as the last place you want to go," said John Ruskamp, Kelly’s assistant principal since 1985. "But we are now known for [having a] good, safe school. So [students] stay more than they used to."

But Kelly faces another challenge: a 33.2 percent transfer rate, the highest in the city. For the classes of 1993 to 1995, 470 students, or 32.7 percent, graduated with their original freshman class.

"Parents move … and the economy affects us, too," Ruskamp said. What’s important is a uniform curriculum: "So when you transfer … you are in the same course and the same curriculum."