Fresh Voices: California High School Students Speak Out About Drop-Out

Margaret Bridges, Project Manager mbridges@berkeley.edu
This project is part of The California Dropout Research Project (http://lmri.ucsb.edu/dropouts), which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation and the Walter S. Johnson Foundation.

Goals:

• To identify the factors that failing and resilient students find motivating or discouraging in their first year of high school.

• To describe the extent to which students report the following factors as contributing to or detracting from their progress in school: 1) relationships with teachers, peers, and parents; 2) the relevance of their classes; 3) their expectations and the expectations others have for them; 4) family responsibilities; 5) school safety; 6) availability of academic supports; 7) the high school exit exam (CAHSEE); 8) school rules, and 9) a sense of belonging.

• To determine how these findings vary across students and among different types of schools.

Background
About 30 percent of all California youths will never graduate from high school, which holds stark implications for their economic and social opportunities, and affects U.S. productivity, as the nation’s overall literacy rate declines. Rising inequality in California is bringing higher social welfare costs and greater housing segregation. Family poverty already has spread from urban centers to inner-ring suburbs, linked to declining levels of educational attainment.

But policy options and rising appropriations – to engage students and increase graduation rates – are based on scarce information about life inside high schools. Given the tens of thousands of students who are failing to pass the high school exit exam, the legislature recently allocated over $70 million to local districts, with the aim of helping students. Yet, due in large part to the dearth of empirical data, districts were given little direction as to how to motivate their students to pass the exam and graduate from high school. Moreover California’s evolving demographic profile may complicate strategies to keep students engaged, with a rising share of high school students coming from families with limited English proficiency. As the structure of income and jobs becomes more bifurcated, the rewards associated with high school graduation may seem to diminish in the eyes of many students.

Project Description
We are collecting data in six California high schools, varying in geographic region and size. Schools were eligible to participate if they have at least 40% of students on free or reduced lunch. From these schools, we recruited samples of ninth grade students who are generally at-risk of dropping out, but included some students who passed all their first semester classes and exhibit resilience. We are collecting survey, class enrollment, grade, and attendance data, and conducting focus groups with these students to identify the factors that are facilitating or impeding their progress in school. For the survey data, regression analyses will be conducted to determine the degree to which individual characteristics, perceived support, school experience and identification, and expectations are related to students’ participation and achievement in school. These relationships will be further analyzed to see if they vary by home language, risk status, or by school characteristics. The focus group data will be analyzed in NVIVO to determine themes about students’ experiences in school that facilitate or impede their motivation and engagement.