Only 40% of Latinos graduate in the Los Angeles Unified School District

Dan Walters:

California is finally implementing a system to track its 6-plus million public school students by assigning identification numbers, which should allow us to finally pin down how many drop out without finishing high school.

Coincidentally, the state is also implementing the oft-delayed requirement that high schoolers pass an exit exam in English language and mathematics skills before being awarded diplomas.

The juxtaposition of the two create fuel for what could be a cultural and political firestorm as explosive as the 1990s clashes over immigration, affirmative action and bilingual education.

A portent of what lies ahead is found in a dry statistical report on high school graduation rates that the California Research Bureau has just delivered to the Legislature, indicating that the state's already abysmal dropout rate could skyrocket once the exit exam takes effect, especially among African American and Latino youngsters in urban areas.

For years, California has maintained the polite fiction that its official dropout rate isn't too bad - about 3 percent per year, based on unaudited reports that school districts provide to the state. Others who have studied the situation come to a far less rosy conclusion - that upward of a third of those who begin the ninth grade fail to graduate from high school.

When the unofficial dropout data are broken down by ethnicity and individual school districts, especially large, urban districts, they get downright ugly. As noted in the CRB report, independent studies indicate that the dropout rate for African American students is about 45 percent and that of Latinos only slightly better. In the state's largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, fewer than half of its 700,000-plus students are likely to graduate, and it dips to 40 percent for Latino youngsters.

The new tracking system will doubtless confirm those numbers, but as startling as they may be, they reflect the situation before the high school exit exam was imposed on the class of 2006, and another section of the CRB study indicates that when it hits, ranks of graduates will thin even further.

Although 78 percent of today's high school seniors have passed both sections of the exit exam and therefore (assuming their grades are sufficient) will receive diplomas in a few months, the CRB report says, for Latinos and African Americans (together, half of high school enrollment), passage rates are well under 70 percent.

Extrapolating from the two sets of data, the exit exam could push graduation rates for African American and Latino youngsters down to a third of those who begin the ninth grade - even lower in Los Angeles and other urban school districts.

As if that weren't disturbing enough, the CRB report also surveys data on college preparation and finds a skewed effect on non-white and non-Asian students as well. Of African American and Latino kids who get through high school now (before the exit exam), just 25 and 22 percent, respectively, have completed the coursework for admission to the University of California or California State University systems.

All in all, therefore, fewer than 15 percent of African American and Latino youngsters who begin the ninth grade will be prepared for four-year college admission.

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