Tune out, drop out

Washington Post: Students who drop out of school tend not to get a lot of attention. They often haven’t gotten much attention in class (when they show up), and their departure often goes unnoticed. So it is noteworthy that Virginia is in the forefront of a national movement to track students most at risk of dropping out and give them extra help.

The Virginia Education Department recently reported that nearly 9 percent of the state’s public school students in the Class of 2008 dropped out of high school. In Northern Virginia, Alexandria had the highest rate, 11.1 percent, while Fairfax County, the largest system in the state, registered 5.6 percent. The numbers are significant because it’s the first time Virginia could calculate them with any certainty. Instead of using the previous, unreliable method of estimating dropouts, Virginia now counts dropouts by assigning students individual identification numbers that allow them to be followed throughout their school careers.

Special interventions

Of course, simply identifying students who drop out won’t prevent the problem, but it does help schools identify which students are vulnerable and need special interventions. Just as important as who is dropping out — and the students quitting school are mostly poor, minority and male — is the question of why.

Nearly a third of the country’s students don’t receive a diploma within four years, and the cost to society shows up in lost wages, increased health-care costs and higher rates of incarceration. No doubt that’s one reason that Education Secretary Arne Duncan included $250 million in stimulus spending for school systems to do a better job of collecting the data.