Seventeen hundred American high schools are "drop out factories," according to a recent report from the Hopkins Center for Social Organizations of Schools.
The study has been met with considerable criticism. School administrators and educators nationwide have criticized the study for its use of the "dropout factory" label as well as its treatment of local and district enrollment data.
"The city of Trenton is in complete uproar over the report," Lucy Guzmán, a Trenton Central High School board member, said.
"The report has been discussed repeatedly at Board of Education meetings. Superintendents of the high school have taken offense to the term 'dropout factory.'"
Tony Mack, a freeholder of Mercer County, N.J., convened a special meeting to bring attention to all high schools in Mercer County on Saturday Dec. 1.
"Together, we have to figure out how to keep kids in school through to graduation and provide whatever they need, such as protection from harm, vocational and technical education, part-time jobs, tutoring or counseling," Mack said.
No school labeled as a dropout factory in the state of Maryland returned to comment on the report.
Critics of the report say the simple comparison of freshman enrollment with senior enrollment fails to take into account various other factors including students who transfer out, repeat a grade or are expelled.
Bob Balfanz, author of the report, argues that these occurrences do not account for the extraordinarily high number of students not reaching 12th grade.
"This can introduce some bias," Balfanz said, "but not enough to fundamentally alter the proposition that a high school in which there are routinely 60 or fewer seniors for every 100 freshmen who started is a high school with a high probability of low graduation and high dropout rates."
"I don't think it will skew a lot of the results," said Mary Maushard, communications director for CSOS.
"Transferring out is a natural process in schools but students don't leave in huge numbers. Where then do the vast majority of the kids go?"
The report estimates that transfer students can only account for one to two percent of the missing students.
Balfanz added that statistics collected by state and local governments are unreliable. Calculations are inconsistent from state to state and even between neighboring districts.
The phrase "dropout factory" has also caused controversy. Critics have argued that the phrase implies that teachers, school administrators or the students in schools with low retention rates, low graduation rates and high dropout rates are the cause of the problem.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," Balfanz said. "The teachers, administrators and students in these schools are often going to heroic lengths to succeed despite long odds."
Balfanz, instead, blamed the intended and unintended consequences of policies implemented by city, state and federal governments, which create schools that are under-resourced, over-challenged and non-supported.
"By no means was this report intended to place the blame on school administrators and teachers," Maushard said. "The goal of the study was to simply highlight a growing problem the country faces."
The report labeled five of Baltimore City's 28 high schools as "dropout factories".
A "dropout factory" is a school in which every year, a significant number of under-prepared and disengaged students enter the ninth grade and struggle to succeed.
"These students become further disengaged, stop attending on a regular basis, fail two or more courses, do not earn promotion to the 10th grade, try again the next year, do no better, likely transfer to another regular school or alternative school, fail to succeed again, and having become over-aged and under-credited and worn down through years of struggle, drop out of school," Balfanz said.
"The process is repetitive, mechanical, and continuous - hence, factory-like."
High schools and vocational schools earn the "dropout factory" label when they graduate less than 60 percent of their freshman class.
While previous studies simply examined the rate of drop-out or the rate of graduation, Balfanz's looks at the retention rate, comparing the number of seniors in a high school to the number of freshmen three-years prior.
The study tracked students for three years - 2004, 2005 and 2006 - in order to ensure that low retention rates were not due to local events, such as natural disasters or economic woes.
According to Balfanz, the retention rate, or "Promoting Power," reveals the extent to which students in a high school succeed in making it from 9th to 12th grade.
The recent report released by the CSOS is an update of a 2004 report called "Locating the Dropout Crisis." This report did not include a list of schools but rather analyzed regional and socioeconomic trends across the United States.
The researchers decided to release the list of schools after the Associated Press approached them for an article about high school dropouts, according to Maushard.
"I will say that this report is like the check engine light on the car," she said. "When the check engine light comes on you pay attention to it. The overall intent was the create awareness," he said.
Urban areas and impoverished rural areas had the highest concentration of dropout factory schools. Dropout schools tend to have large minority populations.
While Utah has no dropout school, nearly half the schools in Florida and South Carolina are classified as dropout factories.
