Randy Dorn: Reaching 90 percent graduation rate won’t be cheap

Washington’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn says the state should set a goal to reach 90 percent graduation rate within the next six years. But he warned KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz that hitting that mark won’t be easy or cheap.

“If you’re at 80 percent graduation rate, your goal is 90 percent. That next 10 percent &#8212 those are students that have a lot of challenges, a lot of barriers in their life,” he said. “They’ve probably made some bad decisions but we need to give them a second chance and those students will be more expensive to help graduate from high school.”

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The four-year graduation rate in Washington is 78 percent, which is below the 82 percent national average. Dorn, who is contemplating a run for governor, said the graduation has increased at least one percent each year since when he took office seven years ago when the rate was at 73.5 percent. He also noted that when kids come back for a fifth year, the rate increases by 3 percent.

Dorn says the state has better data on education than ever before, which has helped distinguish the true story of graduation rates. He said that while white and Asian students graduate at a nearly 98 percent rate, minority and poor students graduate at a much lower rate. To cope with this, high schools are increasingly flagging various behaviors earlier in the process.

The data has shown that if a ninth-grader is absent six days within the first month of school “we can basically be sure that that kid probably isn’t going to graduate from high school,” Dorn said. The same is true if a student is failing a class within the first six weeks of freshmen year.

“Instead of trying to give them help and tutorial when they’re credit deficient in their junior and senior year, we give immediate help right then in their ninth grade year and we design specialized classes to help them with study skills, help them with homework, how to organize themselves, how to ask teachers for questions,” he said. “So those are just some of the strategies that we’re invoking today and, of course, local school districts are looking at different behaviors, too.”

Dorn said many districts have also taken a look at their discipline programs, which showed disproportionate suspensions against African-American males versus white males being punished for the same offense.

“It could be basically like a white student is disrespectful and he gets an hour after school and an African-American kid is disrespectful and he gets a three-day suspension,” he said. “Districts have taken a real close look at that. We’ve done a much better job of doing the analytic data study in showing districts how disproportionate they are.”

Dorn said the key is correcting the problem at five days instead of 15.

“We have seen discipline come down 20 to 25 percent just because people have seen the discrepancies of how they’re treating kids and they have changed their policies in their districts to better understand how they were actually fulfilling the policies of their district,” he said.