Stemming the Dropout Tide
Publication Date: This article originally appeared in the Foundation's 2009 Annual Report in July 2010.
By Carol Towarnicky for the William Penn Foundation
Dropping out of school is a process, one that can take years. Most students disengage in stages, each for a unique and sometimes tangled set of reasons that go beyond what is or is not happening in the classroom.
About 40 percent of students in Philadelphia public and charter schools do not graduate within six years of starting the ninth grade. For some, the contributing factors are obvious. Most young people do not make it through school after being in out-of-home juvenile justice placement. Pregnant or parenting teens do not fare much better. The academic detours posed by abuse, neglect, or placement in foster care usually turn out to be permanent. These “agency-involved” youth represent about a third of Philadelphia’s dropouts, but the overwhelming majority of out-of-school youth drift away more or less invisibly, their complaints of boredom often code for “I felt so far behind, I checked out.”
This trajectory is one that no urban school system has been able to alter significantly, yet Project U-Turn, a citywide collaboration of more than 50 youth-serving agencies, has used groundbreaking research to design and implement innovative strategies to do just that.
The project began five years ago with Philadelphia’s selection as part of a national initiative funded primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, with significant local investment from the William Penn Foundation. Since then, the project has leveraged more than $100 million in new and reallocated money to pursue change in the systems that are not working for these young people.
Project U-Turn pushed the city’s dropout crisis to front and center of the public agenda by getting the message out that everyone who lives and works in the region has a stake in finding a solution. Students who leave school without graduating represent a waste of individual potential and are a serious drag on Philadelphia’s economy. “Simply put, the world has changed and there is no work for high-school dropouts,” says Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University researcher and co-author of the research that underpins Project U-Turn’s strategies. Unemployed dropouts translate into a loss of more than $2 billion in income that could have been spent on goods and services in the region, and another $500 million in lost taxes. Reduced human capital hobbles Philadelphia’s prospects to compete for the jobs of the 21st century.
In his inaugural address in 2008, Mayor Michael Nutter vowed to cut the city’s dropout rate in half within five to seven years. “That has created a whole new set of opportunities,” says Laura Shubilla, co-president of Philadelphia Youth Network (PYN), the collaborative’s managing partner. “We’re not fighting for it to be a priority. It is a priority.”
Cutting-edge research helped to identify, with unprecedented clarity, who was dropping out, when, and sometimes why. In partnership with the Philadelphia Education Fund, Balfanz and co-author Ruth Curran Neild of the University of Pennsylvania (now with Johns Hopkins), used a unique set of data obtained from the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS) developed at the University of Pennsylvania. KIDS allowed the researchers to merge data from the school district with data held by city agencies to track individual students over several years. Their 2006 report, “Unfulfilled Promise,” revealed the true size of Philadelphia’s dropout problem: only about half of public school students graduated on time, while only about 60 percent graduated in six years. The research also underscored the enormity of the challenge. While some students made it as far as 11th and 12th grade before leaving school, a large number of dropouts had fewer than eight credits out of 23.5 required to graduate. “It’s a long way to go from an academic point of view,” says Neild.
Balfanz and Neild’s research showed that many students started getting off track before or early in the ninth grade, with some children showing warning signs as early as sixth grade (sixth grade indicators were documented in separate research by Balfanz and the Philadelphia Education Fund). The research, complemented by comments from students collected in focus groups, suggested several possible ways to get students to come back to school or motivate them to stay there, and confirmed the need to coordinate the huge, disparate systems students come in contact with and sometimes get lost in, including the schools, the juvenile justice system, and the city Department of Human Services (DHS).
Since the research was reported, the Project U-Turn collaborative, led by a 17-member steering committee representing each sector that serves youth in the city, has spurred major systemic changes in agencies long used to doing things the way they have always done them.
“It’s not about bad people doing a bad job; it’s about big systems moving under their own weight,” says Lori Shorr, the city’s Chief Education Officer. “How do you get people to slow down for two seconds and talk about how their systems can be better coordinated?”
Much of Project U-Turn’s success is due to the effectiveness of its managing partner. “PYN is the glue that keeps it all together. It’s always trying to think three steps ahead,” says Courtney Collins-Shapiro, director of the school district’s Office of Multiple Pathways to Education, reflecting the assessment of other project partners.
A prime example of cross- sector collaboration was the establishment in 2008 of a first-in-the-nation Re-Engagement Center to provide a one-stop opportunity for out-of-school youth to begin the process of coming back to school. At the center, located at the school district headquarters, clients are welcomed by interns who provide peer support, then interviewed by counselors from the city’s office of Community Behavioral Health to determine if problems like depression, anxiety, or hyperactivity require referrals. They are counseled by advisors from the city’s DHS who can pull up all their records, courtesy of a computer system that has meshed together data from the schools and city. The advisors work with the young people to decide on the most appropriate program for them. Currently 5,000 slots are available in a variety of programs, including privately run accelerated schools, where students can earn twice the number of credits per semester than traditional high schools; late afternoon programs; E3 Centers (Education, Employment and Empowerment) funded through the federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program and Workforce Investment Act; and Gateway to College, operated in partnership with Community College of Philadelphia, where students can earn high school and college credit simultaneously.
The collaboration extends to the Re-Engagement Center’s funding streams, which are braided together from several sources including schools, government agencies, and the referral network of educational resources. Since opening, the center has served more than 4,000 people and a satellite center in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in North Philadelphia opened in May.
Working together, Project U-Turn partners also have developed strategies aimed at preventing students from dropping out in the first place. A new Re-Entry Initiative assessment program aids in the transition from incarceration back to school. Teen parent classrooms operate in 27 schools and some on-site child care is available. A new initiative will coordinate efforts by the Philadelphia School District, city courts, and the DHS to develop a citywide truancy reduction plan. A new Education Support Center in DHS will track the educational progress of the children in its care, with staff in the department working with schools to provide support to students at risk.
“Both the Education Support Center and the new truancy plan represent stunning cases of policy development at the point where local government services meet the vulnerable population in need,” Mayor Nutter says.
Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has made the early warning data available to all Philadelphia schools and included the number of students on track to graduate on each school’s report card. In addition, Summer Bridge programs and individual mentoring for incoming ninth graders are in place at seven comprehensive high schools. In two middle schools, school staff, social workers, and AmeriCorps-funded participants in the City Year service program are acting as “naggers and nurturers” to sixth graders exhibiting warning signs of eventually dropping out.
Since Project U-Turn’s launch, the public school on-time graduation rate is up nearly 10 percent (comparing 2006 figures to 2008). Has Philadelphia found the winning formula to reach its ambitious goals? The short answer is, it is too soon to know.
Next on the horizon is evaluating the current programs and, in what may be the most challenging task of all, giving them a fair chance to work.
Young people who were “over- aged and under-credited” will not suddenly be transformed into overachievers. It cannot be known for years whether various interventions will work as intended. The key is to balance a commitment to transparency with providing enough time for the programs to gear up, get everyone moving in the right direction, and even to make mistakes and learn from them.
It is not too soon to know that Philadelphia has become a national model for confronting the dropout crisis.
“Cities around the country continue to learn from the Project U-Turn effort,” says Lili Allen, program director of Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit research and advocacy group. “The combination of community and mayoral engagement and district commitment has resulted in real on-the-ground changes that are paying off in higher graduation rates.”
Carol Towarnicky is a freelance journalist. She is a former editorial writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, covering a range of topics including women’s and children’s issues, health care, politics, and Fairmount Park.