The Commonwealth has continued to experience high dropout rates, especially in large urban and poorer public school districts. The statewide average annual dropout rate is 2.9 percent–that’s annual, so it rolls up to about a 12 percent dropout rate over the four years of high school. Some of our urban and low-income districts have dropout rates above 30 percent over four years.

So, what should the members of the Joint Committee on Education do? They should start with what has been proven to work.

Urban vocational technical schools should be allowed to separate from the superintendencies and to function much like the 26 autonomous regional vocational-technical schools in Massachusetts. The dropout rate in regional vocational-technical schools is less than half the statewide average, at 0.9 percent (less than 4 percent cumulatively). The unique attributes that these schools offer, including close adult supervision, individualized instruction to recognized benchmarks, and student choice and commitment to their programs, combine for an effective model that should be expanded.
Policymakers should remove the unhelpful regulations promulgated by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in the summer of 2010 – against the will of many legislators – that placed geographical and other restrictions on digital learning options. Massachusetts should emulate the successful Florida Virtual School program, an alternative educational option that has helped thousands of students, including those at risk of dropping out, learn at their own pace.

So, while many of the bills being debated call for new funding, new structures, and new actions that will take educators’ attention away from the core academic work of schooling, we may not need to go and build a new solution.

For the rest of the article, go to Proven Approaches to Dropout Prevention