Texas losing one in four high schoolers

“Look to your left. Look to your right. Look behind you. One of you won’t be here in four years.”

Do you remember hearing that speech during high school orientation? It’s an old standby because speechmakers can count on it. One in four freshmen in Texas disappears from school by their senior year.

When the new letter grades for Texas schools were released last week, one thing we heard is that certain schools are having a more difficult time because of the student population they serve. The underlying message of “We would do better if we had better kids” is that some kids — minority, poor, English learners — are, by their very being, difficult to teach.

But children are not the problem. Children are not the reason Texas schools have been losing between 24 percent and 26 percent of high school students annually for the last five years.

And things may be getting worse. IDRA’s latest study found that the attrition rate in Texas has risen by one percentage point; not a large increase but movement in the wrong direction. In Bexar County, our high schools lost 28 percent of the class of 2016.

Some kids fared worse than others. While the rates for white students went down by one percentage point, the rates for Hispanic students rose by two points, and for African-American students, rates rose by five points.

In today’s economy, Texas cannot afford to fully educate some students and not others.

IDRA’s forecasting models tell us that by the time today’s kindergarten students are 18, Texas will still not have universal high school education, leaving many Texans without careers, college, and choices in life. This will have a dramatic impact. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen reports that college graduates have 70 percent higher annual earnings than those with only a high school diploma.

So are we serious about getting results for every child? With no significant improvement in the last five years, Texas is stuck. Bexar County is stuck. Why?

We need to be honest about the fact that we plan for 25 percent attrition, and we budget for a two-tiered system. We assume that fewer students will graduate than started in kindergarten. This assumption is built into teacher hiring practices and into curriculum decisions about which courses will be offered and to whom. Student attrition is built into facilities planning and funding decisions.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t refuse to compromise our expectations for graduating all students. All students enrolled in our schools should be expected, and must be supported, to graduate from high school with a strong high school diploma.

The characteristics of the children are absolutely not what leads schools to fail to graduate all students. And by extension it is not due to the characteristics of their families or our communities. Our diverse community brings much strength and commitment. And families have made it clear that they expect our students to not just graduate but be prepared for college and career.

So we cannot pretend some schools get a pass because they have a population of students who are “harder to teach.” But we do know that being poor or minority means you are more likely to be in an underfunded school with teachers who are not well prepared.

Also, as IDRA’s latest report shows, if you are poor or minority or speak another language, you are more likely to be affected by policies and practices that don’t work effectively to keep students in school through graduation.

One such policy is in-grade retention. Retained students have a 14 percent to 50 percent higher risk of dropping out, and the risk increases to 90 percent for those retained twice. While the highest numbers of students retained in Texas are in high school, roughly the same number of first graders are retained as are tenth graders.

In Bexar County, we estimate that 10,800 students were retained in 2013-14. Accelerated instruction in regular and summer programs has been shown to produce better results than in-grade retention.

Another practice that doesn’t work is insufficient support and low funding for English-learner education. IDRA reported in 2015 that English learners are among the fastest growing segments of the Texas student population, but they are one of the lowest academically performing groups. And Texas is significantly underfunding ELL education.

Third, despite what some would have us believe, fair and sufficient funding of public schooling is critical. Schools must have quality teaching and rigorous, up-to-date curricula. Schools depend on fair funding to serve all of their students each school day. Equitable funding makes a difference. In Texas, poor school districts have attrition rates that are more than double those of high-wealth districts.

Fourth, research shows that expectations of students’ abilities are vital to their education. Some school districts are taking high expectations district-wide by considering all students college-material and teaching them accordingly. One district in South Texas, for example, cut dropout rates in half and dramatically increased college-going rates.

But the state of Texas weakened graduation requirements in recent years, shortchanging all students.

A fifth type of detrimental policy is high-stakes testing. Student assessment is essential to informing good teaching and helping communities hold schools accountable, but children must not be hurt in the process. Texas has often gone too far by misusing testing data to hold students back. This neglects to take into account multiple factors that affect student achievement, including inequitable school resources and teaching quality.

One positive policy change by the Texas Legislature recently unlocked diplomas for 6,000 qualified students. IDRA’s analysis found that students who are poor, Latino or African American benefited most from the alternative graduation policy that let school officials consider students’ course grades and other factors. In Bexar County, 370 students were deemed eligible to graduate, through this policy that is set to expire in 2017.

Sixth, IDRA found that zero tolerance policies contribute to high attrition rates of black students and Hispanic students. While practices vary, the general approach is the same: removing students who are deemed disruptive. However, there is no research to support that zero tolerance makes schools any safer.

IDRA’s analysis shows that each year from 2005-06 to 2014-15 in Texas, black students received in-school suspensions nearly two times the rate they comprised in the total population. Students in special education and poor students had higher rates as well. And students as young as 6 years old were removed from their kindergarten classes and sent to alternative schools for “discipline” problems.

In Bexar County, more than 53,000 students were suspended or sent to disciplinary alternative schools.

This has huge consequences as the data show that children are up to 10 times more likely to drop out of high school if they’ve been expelled or suspended.

It’s time that we get ourselves unstuck.

We can change policies and practices that push students out of school and that have the effect of favoring some children over others. We can make sure students have highly-qualified teachers using rigorous curricula. And we can make sure their parents and communities are engaged with their schools and the state provides fair funding to prepare students for 21st century opportunities.

Texas and San Antonio have the capacity, ingenuity and the resourcefulness to get the results we want and that our children deserve.