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6.12.2003

Hispanic Youth Dropping Out of U.S. Schools

Measuring the Challenge

by Rick Fry

Report Materials

Download PDF Complete Report

Press Release

Other Resources

Download PDF Transcript of Press Briefing

High school dropout rates are a key performance measure for the American education system. This report shows that the standard method for calculating the dropout rate leads to a distorted picture of the status of Hispanic students in U.S. schools.

In recent years an influx of young immigrants, who left school before coming to the United States, has swollen the ranks of those counted as Hispanic dropouts. Those youth present long-term policy challenges in language and employment training, but their level of school completion does not reflect the quality of U.S. schools or of Latino achievement in those schools. Rather their presence reflects immigration and labor force trends.

Focusing on data for Hispanics who have dropped out of U.S. schools before completing high school reveals a problem that is quite grave and that has serious long-term implications for the education system, Latino communities and the nation as a whole. However, the numbers in the report show that the problem is not as bad as is commonly thought. Counting only Latinos who dropped out after engaging the American education system yields a rate of about 15 percent among 16- to 19-year-olds. That is good news. The bad news is that this dropout rate is twice as high as the dropout rate for comparable non-Hispanic whites. Further on the positive side, this report finds that the dropout rate for Latinos in U.S. schools is improving as it has been for non-Latinos.

Other Resources

Hispanic Dropout Project
Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Hispanic Dropout Project's mission is to shed light on this national crisis, to produce concrete analyses and syntheses, and to recommend actions that can be taken at all levels in order to reduce the nation's dropout rate of Hispanic youth.

Student Effort and Educational Progress 
This section of the Condition of Education 2003 published by the National Center for Education Statistics examines student effort and rates the progress of students through the educational system among different population groups.
Status and Trends in the Education of Hispanics is a report published by the National Center for Education Statistics. This report studies the educational status of Latinos illustrated by several indicators.
 

Latino Parental Involvment in K-12 Education
In this report, published by Assets for Colorado Youth, is a literature review of Latino Parent Involvement in K-12 Education.

Transforming Education for Latino Youth: Exemplary Practices, Programs and Schools
The National Clearninghouse for Bilingual Education (now NCELA) published this monograph that discusses the many explanations for Latino dropouts and surveys the solutions developed to counteract the problem. 


From Risk to Opportunity: Fufilling the Educational Needs of Hispanics Americans in the 21st Century 
The White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans published this report that recommends 6 goals to close the achievement gap for Latino children.

Harvard Civil Rights Project 
Topics range such as analysis of national core data on dropouts, reform practices, high stakes testing, predicting dropouts, intervention, federal prevention programs and more. 

The California Department of Education provides dropout rates by ethnic group for 2000-2001 school year. The Academic Excellence Indicator System produced by the Texas Education Agency reports dropout and completion rates by ethnic group(scroll midpage). The Florida Department of Education provides a fact sheet of dropout rates by ethnic group and by school district. Dropout statistics by county are provided by the New York State Education Department.  An analysis of dropout rates of Hispanics in the state of Illinois is provided by the Illinois State Board of Education.

Education Week provides education data for each state and the District of Columbia in a searchable map.

National Dropout Prevention Center/Network
The NDPC/N is a national resource center for the study of dropout rates and offer strategies for prevention. It  is a clearinghouse of information as well as sponsoring research projects, publications and conferences.

Capturing Latino Students in the Academic Pipeline
In this brief  published by the the California Policy Research Center reports on three California school-based programs aimed at improving the rate of both high school completion and college attendance among Latino students.