Full Report - Center for Collaborative Education

B What Is the Annual High School
Dropout Rate of LEP Students with
Different Characteristics?
In this section we focus on the dropout rate of LEP
and EP students of different demographic and other
characteristics including grade level, gender, income
status, native language, mobility, designation as
a student with disabilities, and students’ English
proficiency level as measured by MEPA.
Table 22. Grade at Time of Dropping Out 1. LEP and EP Students. BPS, SY2009.
Grade. In SY2009, 201 LEP high school students
dropped out of school, constituting a dropout
rate of 6.6%. High school dropouts accounted
for the majority of the LEP students who dropped
out that year (Table 22). The highest proportion of
LEP student dropouts left school in the ninth grade
(30.8%). Nonetheless, the highest dropout rate is
found among LEP students in the last high school
grades – a full 53.2% of all SY2009 dropouts left
school in Grade 11 or 12, for a dropout rate of
7.0%.
EP LEP
N % of Dropouts Dropout Rate N % of Dropouts Dropout Rate
All High School 1,225 100% 7.0% 201 100% 6.6%
Early High School2 583 47.6% 7.2% 94 46.8% 7.0%
9th grade 367 30.0% 7.1% 62 30.8% 6.2%
10th grade 275 22.4% 6.5% 45 22.4% 6.4%
Late High School2 642 52.4% 6.9% 107 53.2% 6.3%
11th grade 315 25.7% 8.0% 45 22.4% 6.7%
12th grade 268 21.9% 6.4% 49 24.4% 7.3%
Note: 1 Summer dropouts are assigned to the grade they were supposed to enter, per MDESE (2010) methodology. 2 The difference in
dropout rates among LEP students in early high school grades and LEP students in late high school grades is not statistically significant.
IN DEPTH:
Middle School Dropouts
An analysis of the grade at the time of dropping out revealed that 286 students in middle
school grades in SY2009 were coded in SIMS as dropouts: 236 EP students, representing a
dropout rate of 2.2%, and 50 LEP students, representing a dropout rate of 2.4%. All of these
students were labeled as “dropout: student status/location unknown”. Because MDESE does
not provide information on dropouts in middle school, there was no possibility of confirming
these rates and therefore we do not include them in the main body of the report. We
do report them here because the existence of dropouts in middle school is concerning and
further investigation by BPS is warranted. If this data truly represents the extent of the dropout
phenomena in middle school, in SY2009 about 20.0% of ALL LEP dropouts in BPS were
middle school students.
Among these LEP middle school students labeled as “dropouts: student status/location unknown”
by SIMS, 60.0% were in the sixth grade and widely distributed among 32 schools with
grades 6, 7, and 8. Most of them (54.3%) were in programs not for ELLs. Demographically,
the highest proportion of these students were males (58.0%), native Spanish speakers (48.0%)
and 79.1% were at the highest levels of MEPA performance (3 & 4 on the 4 point scale).
Improving Educational Outcomes of English Language Learners in Schools and Programs in Boston Public Schools 51