Conference to address Texas dropout crisis

Conference to address Texas dropout crisis

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Texas loses 135,000 teenagers every year from high school, according to ongoing research conducted by Rice’s Center for Education.

The researchers from Rice and other major universities and research centers around the nation will present their findings at an Oct. 6 conference at Rice to document that the dropout crisis is real.

Titled “The Texas Dropout Crisis and Our Children: A Conference on Graduation Rates, Causes and Policy Solutions,” the conference is intended to educate community leaders, legislators and the news media.

“Each year in Texas, approximately 365,000 ninth-graders begin high school, but 33 percent of them will not graduate four years later,” said Linda McNeil, professor of education and co-director of the Center for Education. “In our major cities, the problem is even worse, as evidenced by Houston, where 51 percent of all students who begin high school will not graduate in four years.” McNeil noted that 57 percent of Latino students and 51 percent of African-American students are among the dropouts in Houston.

Eileen Coppola, conference coordinator and researcher, noted that the purpose of the conference is to show that a large number of research studies concur on the severity of the dropout problem and the need to greatly increase the community’s awareness of it.

In addition to McNeil and her colleagues from Rice’s Center for Education, featured speakers for the conference will include Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy at Harvard University Graduate School of Education and director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard; Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles Ducommon Professor of Education at Stanford University and co-director of the School Redesign Network; Angela Valenzuela, professor of education and director of the Texas Center for Education Policy at the University of Texas at Austin; Christopher Swanson, director of Editorial Projects in Education Research Center (EPERC) and editor of Diplomas Count, a special report of Education Week; and Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology at Rice.

Luncheon speaker will be Maria Robledo Montecel, executive director for Intercultural Development Research Association.

Co-sponsoring the conference with the Center for Education are Children at Risk, Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, and EPERC.

The conference will be held in the Shell Auditorium in Janice and Robert McNair Hall from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Rice students and faculty can attend the conference free, but they must preregister at
<http://centerforeducation.rice.edu>.