WASHINGTON — It’s a nickname no principal could be proud of: “Dropout Factory,” a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That description fits more than one in 10 high schools across America.

“If you’re born in a neighborhood or town where the only high school is one where graduation is not the norm, how is this living in the land of equal opportunity?” asks Bob Balfanz, the Johns Hopkins researcher who coined the term “dropout factory.”

There are about 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide that fit that description, according to an analysis of Education Department data conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press. That’s 12 percent of all such schools, about the same level as a decade ago.

While some of the missing students transferred, most dropped out, says Balfanz. The data look at senior classes for three years in a row to make sure local events like plant closures aren’t to blame for the low retention rates.

The highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest. Most have high proportions of minority students. These schools are tougher to turn around because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones — the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services.

Utah, which has low poverty rates and fewer minorities than most states, is the only state without a dropout factory. Florida and South Carolina have the highest percentages.

“Part of the problem we’ve had here is, we live in a state that culturally and traditionally has not valued a high school education,” said Jim Foster, a spokesman for the South Carolina department of education. He noted that residents in that state previously could get good jobs in textile mills without a high school degree, but that those jobs are gone today.

Washington hasn’t focused much attention on the problem. The No Child Left Behind Act, for example, pays much more attention to educating younger students. But that appears to be changing.

House and Senate proposals to renew the 5-year-old No Child law would give high schools more federal money and put more pressure on them to improve on graduation performance, and the Bush administration supports that idea.

The current NCLB law imposes serious consequences on schools that report low scores on math and reading tests, and this fallout can include replacement of teachers or principals — or both. But the law doesn’t have the same kind of enforcement teeth when it comes to graduation rates.

Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma. For Hispanic and black students, the proportion drops to about half.

The legislative proposals circulating in Congress would:

• Make sure schools report their graduation rates by racial, ethnic, and other subgroups and are judged on those results. That’s to ensure that schools aren’t just graduating white students in high numbers, but also are working to ensure that minority students get diplomas.

• Get states to build data systems to keep track of students throughout their school years and more accurately measure graduation and dropout rates.

• Ensure that states count graduation rates in a uniform way. States have used a variety of formulas, including counting the percentage of entering seniors who get a diploma. That measurement ignores the obvious fact that kids who drop out typically do so before their senior year.

• Create strong progress goals for graduation rates and impose sanctions on schools that miss those benchmarks. Most states currently lack meaningful goals, according to The Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for poor and minority children.

The current law requires testing in reading and math once in high school, and those tests take on added importance because of the serious consequences for a school of failure. Critics say that creates a perverse incentive for schools to encourage kids to drop out before they bring down a school’s scores.

“The vast majority of educators do not want to push out kids, but the pressures to raise test scores above all else are intense,” said Bethany Little, vice president for policy at the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group focused on high schools. “To know if a high school is doing its job, we need to consider test scores and graduation rates equally.”

Little said some students pushed out of high schools are encouraged to enroll in programs that prepare them to take the GED exam. People who pass that test get certificates indicating they have high-school level academic skills. But the research shows that getting a GED doesn’t lead to the kind of job or college success associated with a regular diploma.

Rural schools like GC also make list

Nearly 8 percent of Pennsylvania’s high schools have high dropout rates, with 60 percent or less of their incoming freshmen making it to graduation.

Forty-seven of the state’s high schools are among about 1,700 nationwide that were identified by Johns Hopkins University researchers as having exceptionally high dropout rates.

More than half of the Pennsylvania schools on the list are in Philadelphia, while five are in Pittsburgh. They also include schools in smaller urban districts, such as Erie, Reading and Harrisburg, and those in rural districts, such as Grove City Area in Mercer County and Susquenita in Perry County.

The list also includes six charter schools.

Grove City Superintendent Dr. Robert Post said the data includes students at George Junior Republic in Pine Township, where there is a high turnover rate.

The private rehabilitation institution contracts with the district to provide curriculum, teachers and programs, Post said.

George Junior has an average of 450 students at a time and more than 900 boys in grades nine through 12 pass through in a year, Post said.

He noted that 100 percent of seniors graduate each year.

“They can’t leave,” he said.

High-school graduation rates are one factor that determines whether Pennsylvania schools and school districts are complying with the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools must achieve either an 80 percent graduation rate or a higher rate than in the previous year.

State officials have been developing various strategies in recent years to ensure that children stay in school, such as tutoring for struggling students, Education Department spokesman Michael Race said.

“We tend to focus more on remedies than punitive measures,” Race said. “We have to recognize there’s an underlying issue that’s driving dropout rates.”



Herald Staff Writer Courtney Anderson contributed to this report.