Email this page  Print this page  del.icio.us  digg

Drop-out moves center stage

Ex ASU Chief sees hope

A recent report ranks Arizona last when it comes to kids staying in school. Arizona’s high school drop-out rate is the worst in the nation, sharing last place with Louisiana. For the fourth year in a row Arizona ranks last when it comes to teens ages 16-19 that have dropped out of school. Arizona’s drop-out rate is 12 percent compared to 8 percent nationally. Horizonte host Jose Cárdenas discusses an initiative addressing drop-out prevention with Lattie Coor, chairman and CEO of the Phoenix-based Center for the Future of Arizona. Coor is the former president of Arizona State University. The following is an edited Horizonte transcript.

CÁRDENAS: The Center for the Future of Arizona has made it one of its goals to address the state’s high school drop-out rate. We seem to spend all our time debating whether we are that bad as opposed to discussing the underlying subject.

COOR: Absolutely. And in my view, the answer is a straightforward one, we have a very large drop-out rate in Arizona, we have under any favorable circumstances one quarter of the students who enter our 9th grade in Arizona schools who don’t graduate four years later. We’re doing better; we’re beginning to make some strides, beginning to understand it.

CÁRDENAS: The superintendent says we’re average.

COOR: Well, again, we’re dealing with extrapolations. The thing I would most like to have in everyone’s mind because it’s in ours is that a quarter of our students don’t graduate and that’s a very significant issue for Arizona. Even more so, among our Latino and Native American students, a smaller fraction, more than a third, at times more than 40 percent, aren’t graduating.

CÁRDENAS: What’s going on in Arizona these days.

COOR: The most exciting thing that’s happened in the last decade is the movement in this issue of high school drop-out and high school graduation rate to the center stage in Arizona. The media, public officials, the governor, the national governors’ association, has just adopted a major resolution to get the data comparable across the nation. The superintendent of Public Instruction, foundations like the Rodel Foundation of Arizona have focused on education. We have found our center for the Future of Arizona collaborating with a variety of groups from teachers to superintendents to parents to the rest. This issue is center stage, and giving it that prominence now gives us a much clearer opportunity to do something significant about it.

CÁRDENAS: Now, I think people would be surprised to hear, and I think you’ve mentioned this in the past, that if you look at all of our ethnic groups, including White Caucasian, we’re below the average in every group, and it’s not simply the case that certain school districts with a high minority population bring down the scores in, let’s say, Scottsdale.

COOR: Our way of viewing it is to say it’s everybody’s problem. If you look at the Caucasian completion rate in Arizona compared with other states, we’re below the average. The same is true by each ethnic group. Now, it is particularly so, as I mentioned a moment ago, in Native American and Latino populations, but it is everybody’s problem. It is something that requires our paying attention to all of the populations that we have.

CÁRDENAS: And the center is been paying particular attention to the Latino drop-out rate. Tell us about that initiative.

COOR: We were so taken with one of the recommendations of the Morrison Institute study describing the Latino education dilemma and their language and urging that the state pay some special attention to this very significant large and important part of our population. So we began a study of schools that are Latino intensive, looking for schools that are way out performing what the expectation would be at that school. They’re really very successful schools. Comparing them with other schools and developing an understanding of best practices on the grounds that those schools that are succeeding will have some practices we would then like to harvest and make available to schools throughout the state. The study is moving along well and we expect this fall to have something fairly significant that we’ve learned from it that we can put to work in the field.

CÁRDENAS: And you’ve got two targets as I understand, one the Centennial and one in 2020.

COOR: That’s right. What we’re intending to do is have a graduation goal by the year 2012 that, at the state’s Centennial, increases graduation rates by 12 percent. We call it “12 by 12.” And the second is to have a goal that starts with the first graders a year from now and would have them graduating by the year 2020, when they reach the 12th grade, at a rate that is in the top 10 among the top 10 states in the nation.

Cardenas' interviews are a regular monthly feature in Latino Perspectives. Horizonte airs Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. on Channel 8, KAET. For a full transcript of this interview vistit azpbs.org/horizonte.