April 14, 2008
Albuquerque Journal
It's About Time APS Dropped in With a Goal
Albuquerque Public Schools has been studying its abysmal dropout rate for more than a decade. And while all the inevitable studies and focus groups and cluster meetings have been taking place, one thing has been conspicuously absent.
A concrete, quantifiable, achievable goal.
It's fine for officials to say they want to increase the graduation rate— which was hovering around 53 percent at last count. But when they don't say how much they want to improve it, nobody is held accountable when it doesn't hit the benchmark— for more than a decade.
Marty Esquivel is asking fellow school board members to set a target for improving the high school graduation rate as defined by how many ninth-graders earn a diploma within four years. The national average is 70 percent; Esquivel, saying "there's no reason why we shouldn't be higher," suggests APS hit 65 percent by 2011.
And the accountability part will rest on the shoulders of incoming Superintendent Winston Brooks. Establishing a realistic goal and then requiring Brooks to come up with a strategy to hit it seems fair, considering taxpayers are shelling out $276,000 a year for him.
"Given that kind of investment," Esquivel says, "I think we need to see some results."
And not just results, but apple-to-apple comparisons. Simply taking the number of graduates and subtracting the number of ninth-graders four years earlier pads the stat with incoming transfers.
Along those lines, giving students an extra six months to graduate, like interim Superintendent Linda Sink suggests, needs to be set up as a way to get them through the extra courses they need for a diploma, not just a cheap way to count a passing GED test score as a grad.
Brooks has experience in improving graduation rates— they went from 68.3 percent in '99 to 76.4 percent in '07 while he headed Wichita Public Schools in Kansas. Esquivel is right to want the same for Albuquerque students.
"I've sat on this board for a year now," he says, "and we don't have any goals. I think we've been dragging our feet." That will stop when APS requires Brooks to walk the lower-dropout-rate talk here, as well.