In this week’s Friday Report, the North Carolina Public School Forum includes a short response to my recent Spotlight on dropout prevention grants. You can read their full take here.

Let’s take a look at their arguments (in italics):

Point 1. What the headlines fail to report is that the drop out grant awards were not granted until mid-January of last year and that most school systems receiving grants did not have their new programs up and running until March / April, giving them only three months of the 10 month school year to operate.

This may be true, but the fact is that legislators expect grant recipients to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs by the end of the calendar year (when their grant funding expires or is renewed). One of the only ways that grantees can demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs would be to show that they raised graduation rates for the 2007 – 2008 school year.

More importantly, a number of these programs were already in existence when they were awarded a grant, so there was no “up and running” period.

Point 2. That, however, is also only part of the story.?A number of the dropout grants went to support programs targeting students in elementary or middle school.?One program in Moore County is focused on Latino preschoolers.?The impact of these programs will not be measurable for years.

Precisely. Why fund a program for a year or two (and expect those programs to report results) if you cannot adequately measure their effectiveness for another eight to ten years? What about a fade-out effect? What about the problem of establishing causation between the preschool intervention and dropout/graduation?

In the conclusion of my report, I am pretty clear about these pitfalls,

The results outlined in Tables 1 ? 3 should not suggest that the grant programs directly lowered or raised graduation rates, but they do suggest a troublesome, downward slide in district rates that the dropout grants were designed to stop. Further research will be required to get a complete picture of the relationship, if any, between dropout prevention grants and graduation rates.

There are two obstacles to that research effort. First, many of the dropout prevention grants will not register an immediate, quantifiable effect on a district or school graduation rate because the programs were designed to reach at-risk elementary and middle school students. More importantly, it will be difficult for grant recipients to establish direct, causal connections between the dropout prevention programs and district or school graduation rates. Programs should not receive additional funding and/or replication based on anecdotal evidence. Instead, grant recipients should be able to quantify their program?s ability to retain students and significantly increase the district or school graduation rate. (p. 7)

Point 3. If the Locke Foundation contributes anything to the discussion about state grants it should underscore the frailty of new projects or grants that, because of the General Assembly?s budget process, do not get up and running until the school year is well underway.?Legislative expectations, however, coincide with election cycles.?Programs started in the first year of a biennium are expected to show results, if not in the first year, certainly by the second.

At least they give me credit for something. In all seriousness, a number of these projects are not new and, therefore, should not be considered “frail.”

Anyway, the Forum appears to acknowledge that politics got in the way of sound public policy. Good! I agree!

Point 4. For better or worse, drop out prevention initiatives are typically long-term efforts that will take years to show dramatic results.?That runs contrary to legislative expectations and to Locke Foundation-like studies that only tell half of the story.

First, there are no Locke Foundation-like studies. There is only John Locke Foundation studies. So far, I am the only one to raise legitimate questions about the grants. Ok, that is not entirely true. Rep. Dan Blue (D – Wake County) also raised some important questions, as I pointed out in my report. Rep. Blue said,

Grant programs that were funded seem ?to replicate what they [school systems] already are doing or what they should be doing, in most instances. There are tremendous dollars spent in dropout prevention, and when you look at the results in certain sectors of the student population, one would ask, again playing devil?s advocate, whether just not spending anything in dropout prevention would yield the same results; some of the numbers are so disconcerting. (p. 2)

Second, one of the purposes of the Spotlight was to point out how unreasonable legislative expectations are. In the section of the study entitled Immediate Results?, I acknowledge how absurd it is for the legislature to expect grantees to demonstrate, well, immediate results. Like the Forum, I think this is for worse, not better.