When Dropping Out is Not a Permanent High School Outcome: Student Characteristics, Motivations, and Reenrollment Challenges

Abstract

The customary perception is that students who drop out vanish from school enrollment rosters for good. This is an incomplete picture of the complex dropout story; dropping out is not necessarily a permanent high school outcome. Following the enrollment and course history of a district cohort of first-time 9th graders, this article documents the cohort's dropout, reenrollment, and graduation outcomes. One-third of dropouts reenrolled in district high schools, and older students and students behind in course credits were less likely to reenroll than other dropouts. Interviews with district administrators, high school principals, and reenrollees examined student motivations for reenrolling and challenges districts face when dropouts reenroll. Dropouts return primarily because of limited employment opportunities and efforts of school leaders to facilitate their return. Yet reenrollment created district challenges related to funding, accountability, and getting students who had dropped out on track to graduate.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Drs. Arturo Delgado and Paul Shirk, formerly of the San Bernardino City Unified School District, for their many contributions to this study. Special thanks also go to our colleagues at WestEd for their encouragement and helpful comments.

Notes

¹English language learner information was missing for 52 students in the cohort, including 20 dropouts.

Notes. ¹English language learner information was missing for 20 dropouts.

²SBCUSD classifies students as low socioeconomic status based on qualification for the free- or reduced-price lunch program.

Notes. On-time graduation requires students to earn 50 course credits in ninth grade and 60 course credits each additional year, culminating in 230 course credits; each course completed in a semester is valued at five credits.

²Version 9 of the SAS System for Windows. Copyright © 2002–2003 SAS Institute Inc.

³Prior research has found that schools have varying impacts on their students' decisions whether to drop out. For instance, Rumberger (1995) found that dropout rates were related to the school demographic composition, the size of the school, and the school climate (specifically, whether students feel that the discipline policy at the school is fair). In addition, Lee and Burkam (2003) found that the schools' curriculum, size, and social relations (i.e., the relationships between teachers and students) were related to students' decisions to drop out of school. Both Rumberger (1995) and Lee and Burkam (2003) employed random effects at the school level to account for the correlation of student outcomes within each school site. Because the prior research has found school effects on the decision to drop out of school, we include random school effects in our analysis to account for potential school effects on the decision to reenroll.

⁴The random effects α were not statistically significant in the model. Alternatively, this model could also have been estimated without the random effects, whereby the correlation between students in the same school could, instead, be accounted for using robust standard errors. The results are similar using either of these two methods to model the data.

Notes. Ethnic group comparisons are relative to White and grade of drop out comparisons are relative to dropping out of ninth grade. The odds ratio confidence interval is computed as [exp(β − 1.96 *σ); exp(β + 1.96 *σ)] where β represents the point estimate and σ its standard error.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

⁵If two outcomes have the probabilities (p, 1–p), then p/(1–p) is the odds. The ratio of two odds, such as that for men (p ₁) and for women (p ₂)—thus, [p ₁/(1–p ₁)]/[p ₂/(1–p ₂)]—is called the odds ratio. An odds ratio greater than 1 means that the group has higher odds than the reference group; an odds ratio less than 1 means that the group has lower odds than the reference group.