Thousands of Troubled Students Drop Out Before High School

Chicago Reporter, The, June, 2001 by Mick Dumke

Frederick Lucas was a 15-year-old eighth grader when he dropped out of school a year-and-a-half ago.

"I was always smart, book-wise," he said, shrugging. "Shit just wasn't right at home. I'd be sitting in class, wandering off, and end up doing no work. I just wasn't applying myself. I had too many issues at the time."

Frederick said his mother struggled with alcohol for most of his life. He transferred schools at least 12 times, moved from house to house and eventually landed at his grandmother's in Auburn-Gresham on the South Side. He and friends joined a street gang when he was 11. They stayed out late, sometimes hanging out in liquor stores or bars. At times, he carried a gun to school for protection.

A small-built young man with faint sideburns and a goatee, Frederick was failing all his classes in the fall of 1999 at Cecil A. Partee Academic Preparatory Center, 8101 S. LaSalle St., school records show.

Still, he made an impression on Carol Briggs, principal of Partee, one of the district's nine transition schools for at-risk students who are at least 15 years old. "He was a nice kid," she said. "He was always smiling, but not academically focused. The girls loved him and a lot of his energy was put into that arena."

One afternoon, a teacher accused Frederick of harassing a girl in class and asked him to leave the room, Frederick said. He never went back.

Frederick is one of thousands of teenagers who dropped out of the Chicago Public Schools before reaching ninth grade, a joint investigation by The Chicago Reporter and CATALYST: Voices of Chicago School Reform revealed. The publications analyzed data provided by the Chicago Public Schools to the Consortium on Chicago School Research, an independent nonprofit that assesses school reform.

As the elementary dropout rate climbed by 86 percent in the 1990s, the school system has failed to develop programs to help or keep track of those youths. National data, however, suggest elementary school dropouts face even higher risks of poverty and incarceration than those who leave high school early.

"They've been the silent dropouts no one really talks about," said Patricia Preston, director of alternative education for the City Colleges of Chicago. Preston served on the Illinois State Board of Education's committee on at-risk youth from 1998 to 2000. Chicago's public schools are overwhelmed by high school dropout rates, she said. "The assumption is that elementary students are graduating, but we've known for years ... [the dropouts] were there."

The Reporter/CATALYST investigation found:

* From 1991 to 1999, an average of 1,400 youth each year left Chicago's public schools in the sixth, seventh or eighth grade.

* Sixteen of every 1,000 elementary students dropped out during the 1999-2000 school year, compared to nine in 1991-1992.

* Elementary dropouts are most likely to be African American. In 1999-2000, for example, 65 percent were black, while African Americans represented 52 percent of the system's sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade population. That year, 22 of every 1,000 African American boys dropped out, compared to 18 of every 1,000 black girls, 13 per 1,000 Latinos and 11 of every 1,000 whites.

* By law, children under 16 can return after being dropped from school rolls. But 73 percent of those who left between 1991 and 1995 did not return to the Chicago Public Schools within four years.

While the consortium's dropout numbers are based on records provided by the Chicago Public Schools, school officials told the Reporter they are inflated. "At the elementary level, we have not had a significant number of students to drop out," said Blondean Y. Davis, the school system's chief of schools and regions. She said most students reported as dropouts actually transferred to other school districts, but their former schools did not record the change.

In 1999, Chicago reported 1,222 dropouts from sixth to eighth grade to the state of Illinois, but Davis said the real number is much lower. Still, Davis acknowledged she could provide no accurate, system-wide numbers or estimates of elementary school dropouts--even though the Illinois School Code requires that schools report the correct number and age of all dropouts to the Illinois State Board of Education.

The state code also requires that parents and guardians keep children in school until age 16. But, regardless of age, once a student misses 20 days, Chicago's public schools can cut them from the rolls. Illinois law defines all such children who have not transferred to other districts as dropouts.

Chicago's elementary dropout numbers seem "pretty high," considering that nationwide, students rarely leave school before ninth grade, said Russell Rumberger, an education professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a national expert on dropouts. About 6 percent of U.S. residents 18 or older have not earned more than an eighth-grade education, according to a March 2000 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Elementary school dropouts typically struggle with academic and personal problems for years before they decide to leave school, Rurnberger said. "It's really, really sad," he said. "And it never should happen."