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Transcript of NTA Conference Call Presentation held on 03/18/97

Dropout Prevention Issues Concerning Youth with and without Disabilities

Presented by

Mary Fox Sinclair, Ph.D.
The Institute on Community Integration

Mary Sinclair (Institute on Community Integration): Good afternoon, I would concur with Teri's statement that I think School-to-Work is real exciting and places emphasis on a real important aspect of dropout prevention programs. I'm going to begin our presentation by identifying some of the key assumptions that frame our current understanding of the dropout problem. Next, I will provide just a few additional contextual pieces of information that are pertinent to the development of the prevention policies and programs. However, I will spend the majority of the presentation focusing on specific dropout prevention strategies and key intervention elements for keeping kids engaged in school and on track to graduate, in particular, how to promote school completion. Finally, I will summarize by focusing on some specific policy recommendations that address the question of what should be done.

Before I begin, I'm going to start with a disclaimer, a word of caution. There is very little data on the effectiveness of dropout prevention in the intervention strategies. Most of the research on school dropout prevention focuses on who dropped out and why. There is little data-based information on the specific programs and strategies to keep kids in school. The information that is available, is mostly just descriptive. Practitioners and policy makers need more info on research-based long term dropout prevention models. I don't mean to suggest that there is not good information, but there just is not a lot of data-based information.

ASSUMPTIONS
So with that in mind, it is important to start with some assumptions. There are six assumptions I want to highlight which frame our current understanding of the dropout problem. These assumptions are based both on literature review and our own dropout prevention research here at the University of Minnesota.

The first two assumptions have implications for assessment and identification procedures. So when you are thinking about who to target for dropout prevention kinds of programs, the first two assumptions have implications for clearer kinds of practices.

1. Dropping out is a process. Leaving school prior to graduation is not an instantaneous event. Students don't decide to drop out one day and not come back to school the next. Jeremy Finn describes this process of dropping out in terms of three key components: a) participation, b) school performance, and c) identification with school. He describes how students participate in school, and that refers to attending school, attending classes, completing their course assignments, participating in extra curricular activities and participating in school government kinds of functions. Participation in school leads to positive school performance. As we know from research, students who attend school and complete their course assignments tend to pass their classes. And in turn, positive school performance leads to positive identification with school. Students feel like they belong in school and can share common values with other students and teachers and their educational programs. So the flip side would be that students who are at risk of dropping out are students who are showing signs of disengaging from school; they're not attending class, not getting their course work completed, they're failing school, getting suspended, etc. If you ask these students who are at risk of dropping out what they think about school, they'll tend to say that school is irrelevant, it has no meaning, and they have low expectations for even completing school and graduating from school. And again, when you think about dropping out as a process, it really suggests that intervention should start early, before the process becomes so escalated that it becomes chronic. We should focus on those transitional periods from elementary school to middle school, and middle school to high school.
2. There should be an emphasis placed on predictor variables that educators and family members have some ability to influence. If you look at the research, the majority of the literature talks about who is at risk of dropping out. And those characteristics include what I refer to as status indicators, such as socioeconomic status, geographic region of the country, metropolitan status of the community. We know that there is a disproportionate number of students who are poor, black, Hispanic, Native American, live in the southwestern regions of the country and/or are attending urban or rural schools, are more likely to drop out. However, educators really have no control over socioeconomic status and furthermore, many of these indicators are actually fairly unreliable predictors. Some studies in the last five or ten years or so have looked at, for example, the predictive power of ethnicity and when you control for socioeconomic status, differences tend to virtually disappear. The other type of variable that's associated with students who drop out is what I like to call alterable indicators. And these, as the names implies, are those kinds of variables or factors that educators, family members and/or practitioners can do something about, including attendance, behavior problems and academic performance. So, we know that attendance and suspension are highly related to dropping out. If we can focus our energies and dropout prevention programs on those kinds of indicators which we can influence, we are more likely to have success in terms of reducing dropout rates and increasing school completion rates. Also, these kind of predictors are just as robust as the status predictor variables and more reliable. If you're going to target students based on attendance and poor grades, you are more likely to be putting your energy where it's going to be most needed - those kids who are already starting to withdraw from school.

   Now, the remaining assumptions have implications for intervention.

3. Solving the dropout problem will require a multicomponent effort of home, school, community and youth. Essentially we are saying that schools, employers or parents cannot do it alone. Dropout prevention requires a long term comprehensive approach, and based on our research in Minnesota, I would add that the intervention support should really follow the student and the family. What we found is that school-based, one size fits all programs (e.g. a social skills dropout prevention program or a tutoring program) are not going to make a big impact on all the kids who are in need of support. So, there needs to be a collaborative approach that takes a long term comprehensive perspective.
4. The partnership between the schools and the family should be facilitated by the schools; it should be the schools reaching out. Some studies have found that those schools that have the highest rates of parent involvement, controlling for all sorts of background variables, had the most intensive outreach effort. The schools must take the lead in developing the partnership, in reaching out to the families and community resources.
5. Students must be in power to take control of their own behavior related to school completion. It's obviously not about building dependency, but rather empowering students as well as their family members with the skills, information and knowledge.
6. While students with disabilities are more likely to drop out than most other students, particularly youth with learning disabilities and behavior disorders, there's no evidence to suggest that the intervention approaches must be different than approaches for students without disabilities. I would say the only variation might be that students with disabilities might require more intensive or long term support, but that type of support doesn't need to be different.

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION
With those assumptions, I just want to highlight some contextual information that I think are also important to consider in the development of local policies and practices. If you ask students with or without disabilities, their reasons for dropping out are the same: "problems getting along with teacher, getting suspended or expelled, unclear discipline policies, bad grades or doing poorly in school, not liking school, peers dropping out, inability to get into the desired programs, pregnancy or teenage parenthood, need to support family by working, providing daycare to younger siblings or being offered more appealing options than going to school" (such as a job, getting married or something like that). Students' reasons for dropping out really line up with the alterable indicators (e.g. suspension [which is] highly predictive of dropping out [can be correlated with] students talking about unfair discipline policies as their reasons for leaving). This tends to confirm the hypothesis that we need to focus on alterable predictor variables when we are talking about identifying kids and developing strategies for keeping kids in school.

The dropout rate has actually improved since the early 1900's and there has been no change since about the 1960's. So, the issue today really is not so much that dropout rates are getting worse, but that there's lack of viable employment for students without a diploma which increases the cost to the individual and to society for those students who then become more dependent on social services. National Educational Goal 2 focuses on school completion rather than dropout prevention, and I think part of that was trying to focus on the positive rather than the negative. So, in thinking about establishing any kind of policies, one might want to consider framing it in terms of "school completion."

It's important to be aware that there are multiple ways of completing school. Students don't necessarily need to follow the traditional route of graduating from a traditional high school. There are alternative schools and programs, such as charter schools, which have been growing since 1991, a GED diploma, adult basic education program, or certificates of completion or attendance. These are all alternative ways for students to earn that stepping stone that they need, that diploma or alternative credentials to allow students into entry level employment and post secondary education options. The flip side is considering differential diplomas. Schools need to be aware that individuals and some families don't want a diploma which is different from the standard high school diploma. The policies on graduation requirements are not always including kids with disabilities. It's an issue to think of and to be aware of as there may be other states who have already formulated the graduation requirements. And to consider if students are excluded from those requirements, does that really necessarily mean that those students should be excluded from testing. Students with disabilities must be included in the accountability mechanism, the state-wide accountability model. Again, I am suggesting issues we must consider.

DESCRIPTIONS OF PROGRAMS
Next, I will describe programs or types of programs. I will begin with laundry list of types of programs to give you a feel for the range or options of programs that have been attempted. This first list is from about five different literature reviews. Then, I'd like to talk about some data-based strategies that have support in terms of their effectiveness. Finally, I'll move on into policy recommendations. I think it's interesting to note in 1989, the Department of Health and Human Services and all State Governors were charged with identifying dropout prevention strategies that could be adopted by states, as part of the national education summit. I'm sure there are multiple efforts prior to 1989 addressing these kinds of issues, but in their findings, they agreed on the lists of variables or factors that were associated with dropping out, those indicators we talked about earlier. However, the consensus was absent on which problems to attack first, which efforts revealed the most dramatic results and how efforts could be effectively coordinated. The report indicated that there are few comprehensive studies to answer the complex questions that policy makers and practitioners needed to address the problem. Unfortunately, for the most part, this is still somewhat true. But when you are thinking about developing district-wide or state-wide policies, one of those things to think about is building in evaluation or program evaluation of research efforts and initiatives so that those schools attempting to do something have the resources to measure and reevaluate the effectiveness of the programs, so others can learn from those initial efforts.

With that in mind, I'm going to describe a range of programs that have been attempted. The first literature review I'm going to talk about is the work of Anthony Cippiloni. He identified the following nine types of dropout prevention or remediation programs:

1. Counseling or tutorial programs. A type of model that provides collaborative support services within the school setting. A referred student might access the range of counseling or academic kinds of support services. Approximately 94% of all dropout prevention programs that have been studied include the counseling model.
2. School-within-a-school or cluster programs. This type of model is designed to create a smaller community atmosphere to provide a personalized and supportive school experience. I think this has been adopted by a good deal of school reform initiatives, and middle school models have adopted this most frequently, developing kind of a smaller cluster of schools within schools, so that students and teachers can get to know one another better.
3. Work study, cooperative education or pre-employment programs. You all are probably more familiar with this than I am. The focus is on vocational curriculum, supervised job training, and employment or pre-employment experience to younger youth.
4. Adolescent parenting program. A model targeted mostly for young mothers. Academic support is provided, as well as parenting programs and daycare for the parents in those programs.
5. Promotional programs. These mostly focus on high school kids who are behind in credits. They are designed for students who are in jeopardy of being retained or have been retained and typically include summer school programs or extended day programs (e.g., Saturday schools). It's an opportunity for students to earn more credits and then be promoted onto the next grade level.
6. Alternative discipline programs. These are mostly alternative discipline strategies. And the concern here is out-of-school suspension and expulsion, [addressing] how students can be disciplined without missing more school (e.g. in-school suspension, detention programs, Saturday schools, or even community work service).
7. Conflict resolution, mediation or problem solving programs. This type of model is designed to improve the school climate to encourage students to become participating members of the discipline programs in the schools and have students be part of developing and designing those discipline policies, as well as enforcing those policies by giving them the skills to deal with all conflicts constructively.
8. Furlow program. A model where students are given the opportunity to take leave from their regular school program and to receive credit, kind of a rolling credit option. And these are targeted mostly for migrant workers or families whose religious or sacred traditions kind of clash with the traditional school schedule.
9. Teacher advisory or mentor programs. A model which focuses on relationship building. It can be used to focus on kids in transition - from elementary to middle school or middle school to high school - and to provide students with the opportunity to build a relationship with an adult. So two ways that this is achieved is by, a) bringing in an adult mentor and pairing him/her with a student or having an older student serve as a mentor for a younger student, or b) developing a teacher advisory model, where in high school you have students who are matched with the same teacher for the four years that they are in school. There is somebody who knows them over an extended period and knows if they are present and knows if they are not present rather than students going through high school not known to anyone.

Another classification to the list of review was done by Clara Wolman, Bob Bruininks and Martha Thurlow. They focused on special education studies that included kids who are at risk for dropping out of school. And they have identified programs in terms of four general kinds of categories:

1. Instructional or academic-related programs. Programs which emphasize school structure. These kinds of programs take an individualized approach to teaching and learning. They are flexible in the curriculum and in school hours, focus on basic skills instructions, have low student-teacher ratios, and alternative educational programs or settings. There is an enforcement of the attendance policies and greater emphasis on staff training.
2. Economic or work-related programs. This includes vocational education, employment prep and job training, providing help with the job search, community based work experience, and financial incentives.
3. Personal or affective-related programs. Programs that focus on psychological support, including counseling, personal development and improving self esteem. That development is focused on fostering a caring and supportive staff.
4. Social services or health-related programs. Programs focusing on healthcare, family planning, childcare, and mental health services.

The following information comes out of the middle school dropout prevention projects that we are focusing on at the Institute on Community Integration, funded by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Program. There were three projects that were funded to look at middle school kids with learning and behavioral disabilities to do some early intervention and development of dropout prevention programs. One was here in Minnesota, one with the Seattle Public Schools and one with the Los Angeles Unified Schools... they were all urban focused. There were five key intervention elements that all three projects identified that lead to a) increased enrollment at the end of three years of intervention, and b) students earning significantly more credit. There is a comparison group that gives a little bit more credibility to some of these intervention strategies. All three of the projects took a collaborative approach; we were all working together with families and schools and trying to build that link between home and school. We all drew upon community resources in an effort to build and strengthen those relationships.

The five key intervention elements included monitoring, relationship building, affiliation, problem solving, and persistence plus.

1. The monitoring element referred to keeping abreast of what students were doing in school. This was accomplished by targeting the occurrence of risk behaviors, which we talked about before, such as absences and suspensions, and by measuring the effects of intervention applied, as well as keeping parents aware of the student's behavior and how they were doing as the students progressed.
2. The relationship building element focused on the adult-student connection primarily. The foundation of relationship building was based on a premise that an adult associated with school cared about the students educational experience and noticed and acknowledged the student's progress. So again, the relationship was really school focused.
3. Affiliation referred to students connection with school and sense of the belonging, promoting student's participation in school-based programs, whether they were after school or before school.
4. Problem solving strategies focused on empowering the students to address their problems and think through solutions rather than acting on impulse, using a cognitive behavioral approach.
5. Persistence plus, I would say, is probably the key intervention element. It refers to persistence, continuity and consistency: persistence meant that there was someone who was not going to give up on the student or allow them to be distracted from the importance of school; continuity meant that there was someone who knew the student's needs and was available throughout the school year, through the summer and into the next year; and consistency meant that that message was the same from all concerned adults only increasing or decreasing in intensity, based on the students level of engagement with school. What was really unique about this persistence piece, particularly at the secondary level, was one adult continued to work with that student over a number of years, which is not always common in secondary programs. And this persistence really kept the issue of education salient among those students, their family members and their teachers. It didn't allow anyone to give up on that student or the student's educational progress regardless of whether they were doing well at the time or were in serious jeopardy of withdrawing from school completely.

Hugh Berry (U.S. Department of Education): Hi, this is Hugh Berry from the U.S. Department of Education. I work with the dropout prevention projects and one thing that I think others in our office and the department are concerned about, or not concerned about, but one thing that we are now responsible for showing, is evidence of things that work with the focus on results. We were being asked what are the best practices? In other words, justify your day-to-day existence or the continuation of these types of programs. This is a question that really hasn't been asked prior to the last couple of years.... What types of data collection and research needs to be done to demonstrate the efficacy of programs? Because you listed a number of things that I think are very important and we have a pretty good idea that it does work. But to show effectiveness, I think we need to do more and I just wanted to know what your view was on that.

Mary Sinclair (Institute on Community Integration): I think there are three strategies that we can use. One strategy is using analysis that look at the non-experimental data sets and look at relationships, [as did] the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the National Longitudinal Transition Study of Special Education Students. Russ Rumberger in 1995 published an article, and he identified a number of strategies that were highly associated with staying in school and/or dropping out. Mary Wagner identified a few strategies that have been associated with lower dropout rates among kids with disabilities. A second strategy would be to look at funding some program evaluation of existing dropout prevention programs. For instance, infuse money for those programs to either look at some baseline information and change over time among students who are targeted for intervention, or to identify a comparison group and collect ongoing longitudinal information looking at the effectiveness of those existing programs. Those two options I think would probably be the most cost effective. The most expensive, but the most solid data, obviously, would be funding for longitudinal, experimental designs with a treatment and control group. And I know that there are some existing programs or some U.S. Department of Education dollars that are actually going toward those types of studies. But again, if we can have a few of those kind of longer term longitudinal studies, I think that will also contribute to the knowledge base out there.

Hugh Berry (U.S. Department of Education): Thank you.

Teri Wallace (National Transition Alliance): Mary, are there some comments that you want to make about policy recommendations?

Mary Sinclair (Institute on Community Integration): Yes, we had identified from our middle school dropout prevention projects five policy recommendations. The first recommendation, and some of these might reiterate some of the comments that have been made, was to develop a system to monitor students progress towards graduation. The intent is to encourage districts to look at indicators of whether students are withdrawing from school or not. So there is a systematic way of following whether students are absent, whether they are failing in their classes, or whether they are getting suspended, of building in a mechanism for flagging those students who are engaging in those kinds of behavior and incorporating a response system to that. There are district resources to respond to those kids who are engaging in high risk behaviors. The second recommendation is to form a team of stake holders to develop intervention strategies for high risk students. There are, as I demonstrated by the laundry list, a number of intervention strategies and there are some models out there that are more comprehensive in nature. So the idea would be to have this group of stakeholders sit down with that existing information and say, "Okay, what's applicable for our community and students?" And I think we talked about that with Hugh Berry's question, that there are some efforts out there being implemented, but we don't have real good program evaluation data to know which programs are most effective, and where to start and when to start. I should mention that there are a couple of national conferences and organizations that might be good sources of possible models if folks have the opportunity to attend some of these conferences. One is the Alternative to Expulsion, Suspension and Dropping Out of School, an annual conference sponsored by the States School Coalition and I think they're held every January in Orlando, Florida. (So it's actually in a nice place to go!) Many of the leading dropout prevention programs being implemented across the country attend. Another annual conference that might be helpful is held at the National Dropout Prevention Center in Clemson, South Carolina. If you are calling from outside of the state, its 1-800-443-6392 and they have a full data base that you can access for information on conferences, etc.

Teri Wallace (National Transition Alliance): Thank you Mary, that's been very informative. Any last minute questions?

Roy Kimble (Texas): Yes, this is Roy Kimble from Austin, Texas. Other than the obvious stakeholder that you talked about in your second point regarding the development of intervention strategies, who are those stakeholders that you deem are essential for a good intervention effort?

Mary Sinclair (Institute on Community Integration): That's a good question. In the development of our model that we implemented in Minnesota, we actually sat down with those folks who were the front line workers, those who interact directly with the youths at risk for dropping out. So we started with the support of those people who had the power to make the program happen.... Then we sat down with the teachers, the students, the parents, and with the community outreach workers and developed a model. I think in other efforts here in Minnesota, we've been taking that model and applying it to new populations and new groups of students and communities. We began working with folks from the truancy prevention perspective and so we've been working closely with the Department of Corrections, with social services and probation officers as well as the school who developed the model.

Roy Kimble (Texas): Good! What kind of response did you get from parents in those efforts?

Mary Sinclair (Institute on Community Integration): When we first sat down with the parents, as well as with the teachers, our very first interaction was intense; it is the only way I can describe it. It was the first time parents felt that they had somebody who was listening to what they had to say, and the parents blamed the teachers, teachers in turn blamed the parents. We actually were lucky enough to have a trained mediator with us who did a beautiful job of acknowledging everyone's concerns but was able to say, "Hey we're all at the table for the same reason, and it's not about blaming each other. It's about moving on in developing solutions...." I think that given that we had a long term commitment to doing something about it, and that everyone had an opportunity to speak their mind and was listened to, they all came back. They continue to come back and continue to contribute to the development of the solution. I would say there can be a lot of hostility the first time you get any group of individuals together, but if there is a demonstrated long term commitment to the program, you're going to get people coming back, time and again.

Teri Wallace (National Transition Alliance): And with that we are going to rap up. Thanks a lot Mary, and thank you everybody for your questions.

National Transition Alliance for Youth with Disabilities (NTA) conference call presentations are sponsored by the NTA and coordinated by the National Transition Network. For a copy of this or other transcripts, contact us at:

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URL: http://ici1.umn.edu/ntn/audio/1997/mar.html
Posted June 5, 1997
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