Houston thinks small to prevent dropouts
HOUSTON — Officials at Texas’ largest school district, which once miscounted nearly 3,000 dropouts, hope that by taking a personal interest in at-risk students and dividing them into smaller classes, they will stay in school.
With the school year under way, Houston Independent School District educators are knocking on the doors of students who failed to return to class to encourage them to re-enroll. The district’s 24 comprehensive high schools also have been divided into “learning communities” to enhance relationships among students and teachers.
It’s an effort to bring the 211,000-student school district — a model for President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act — in line with state dropout rates and to help the students who most need it.
“Most kids who drop out drop out because nobody knows them,” said Steve Amstutz, principal of Lee High School. “Nobody knew they were gone. Nobody’s given them the pat on the back, the kick in the pants, the encouragement or the support.”
About 75 percent of the 16,638 students who started ninth grade in Houston in 1998 graduated four years later, according to the most recent available records. That’s lower than the state average of nearly 83 percent. The district aims for an 85 percent graduation rate by 2007.
Houston’s dropout problem has been in the national eye for two years following an investigation that found that the district miscounted nearly 3,000 dropouts in the 2000-2001 school year, and that employees at one high school falsified records to show zero dropouts.
Regulators, who suspended Houston’s “academically acceptable” accountability rating last year, restored it in July after the district revamped record-keeping.
District spokesman Terry Abbott said the scrutiny invigorated the effort to keep students in school and awoke the community to its role in solving the dropout problem.
“We have kids for what, seven hours a day? Many of the problems they run into come when they leave our schools,” Abbott said.
Still, some critics say the district — a springboard for former superintendent and current U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige — isn’t doing enough to retain students.
Mary Ramos, deputy state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said there is more to the dropout problem than losing contact with students. She said school counselors discourage many Hispanic students from applying to college.
“The counselors were saying, ‘Well, you know you’re not college material. I suggest you look into mechanics or hairdressing or something like that,’ ” Ramos said.
In a speech in Houston last December, Paige said he welcomed scrutiny of his former district but that some of the claims of misleading test results or problems with statistics were politically motivated or outright wrong.
“If they can muster substantial dirt on the Houston school system, then they hope to damage the national implementation of No Child Left Behind,” he said.