After writing the other day about the verbal abuse that charter schools get, I noticed today that in the report on dropouts from the California Dropout Research Project (CDRP), they lump charter schools in with alternative schools as the source for the majority of the dropouts. There were stories appearing in variety of papers about the report, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, and the Los Angeles Times.

I have a few problems with the report.

First, it used the one-year dropout rate. In other words, they only looked at how many students dropped out in a single year. The more valuable and I think more honest approach is to look at how many students entered the school as freshman and then four years later, how many of them have dropped out in 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th grade.

Second, I think it is misleading to lump charter schools and alternative programs together. Looking at the data from the California Department of Education that CDRP used, there are some pretty big differences in the data from charters and alternative programs.

For example, CDRP showed Los Angeles Unified's dropout rate for traditional schools as 4.1%. They showed the combined charter/alternative dropout rate as 12.2%. If you break out the charter schools separately, the results are quite illuminating. The dropout rate of alternative programs in LAUSD is a whopping 20.7% while the charter school rate is 0.9%, even lower than the traditional schools. Even more telling is that charter schools are only responsible for 112 of the 10,588 dropouts in LAUSD that year. That's only .001% of the dropouts. In LAUSD, charter schools are not problem.

In San Francisco Unified, alternative schools have a 10.6% dropout rate compared to 1.7% for the charter schools. They're not the problem there either.

Of course the other reality that causes me to doubt the impact of this report is that students in alternative schools and charter schools tend to be students who did not have success in traditional public schools. For some alternative programs, the students have already dropped out more than once. Given the nature of the student population you might well expect higher dropout rates of alternative school students.

Dropout rates or graduation rates are useful measures of a school's success, but they need to be considered in conjunction with grade-level proficiency rates and achievement gaps to provide a better measure of the success of a school or district. The CDRP report not only omits the academic performance component, but they don't even use the best method of calculating the dropout rate. Add to that their weird combining of charter and alternative schools. Given all these considerations, I don't find the report particularly reliable or useful.