Data shows that former English learners are more resilient in staying in school than native English speakers

Over the span of eleven years since 2010, the national high school dropout rate has shown a consistent decline. In 2020, it stood at 8.3%, dropping notably to 5.2% in 2021. In 2018, the rate hit 5.3%, indicating substantial progress in retaining students and facilitating their attainment of high school diplomas.

David Steiner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, pointed out some dropout reasons from the broad picture. “They (students who drop out from school) have missed too many days of school, and therefore they are pushed out. They are just getting very low grades, or they don't like the school board at school, and they just switch off.”

Picking a typical year during the period when nationwide high school dropout was decreasing, say, 2018, how was New York City doing at that time? Did its high school dropout rate surpass or fall below the national average? Overall, the city's dropout rate aligns closely with the national figure. However, Bronx County reported a notably higher dropout rate of 7.8%, while Queens boasted the city's lowest rate at 4.1%.

Why is that? What are some factors related to the high school dropout rate in NYC? Being an English learner is a very common one. Steiner also gave an example of how hard an English language learner's (ELL) life can be. “If you suddenly were dropped by your parents in a foreign country where you didn't speak the language, and you couldn't understand what was going on in school. You didn't know the customs,” said Steiner, “I mean, it is pretty tough, right?”

Looking into the dropout data of ELL, former ELL, and non-ELL students in NYC, we found something interesting. The Bronx has the lowest ELL high school dropout rate but the highest former ELL and non-ELL dropout rate in NYC. That means compared to other EL students in the other four NYC counties, ELs in the Bronx are doing okay in schools, but students here who are former ELs and who are native English speakers are more likely to drop out from school compared to their counterparts in other counties. Plus, Manhattan has the highest dropout rate of EL students in NYC.

According to a study conducted by Fordham University, there are generally seven academic challenges of high school ELs, including 1) inadequate/poor academic preparation, 2)not able to pass NY State high school (Regents) tests required for graduation, 3)lack of English language proficiency, 4)difficulty in catching up content and language at the same time, 5)difficulty keeping up with the technical vocabulary and complex academic, 6)poor education prior to USA schooling, and 7) failing individual content area tests and course requirements.

To help ELs improve their study, the research points out that teachers can overcome some instructional challenges by helping the students understand reading material, giving them sufficient time to complete tasks, making the class size smaller, giving them more mentoring, providing more classroom activities, helping them connect classroom content to real-life situations, and customizing instruction approaches to target different students.

Another interesting finding here is that, across the five counties, former ELLs always have a lower dropout rate than non-ELLs. That means students who weren’t fluent in English but later gained proficiency are doing better than native English speakers in schools.

Steiner explained that this is because former ELLs have been in adversity but now they've got a victory and they continue to work hard and they do well.

“If they're going to drop out, they're going to drop out soon,” said Steiner, “If they stick with it and they've got their inner strength, you know, they're not less capable than American students, obviously, and they do fine.” Steiner thinks it is just a question of overcoming the initial hurdles; after getting through the first couple of years, they can even do better than they do.

Other than English languaging learning, being economically disadvantaged is another common reason for pulling students out of school. Poverty can hinder students' ability to study effectively due to inadequate family support and lack of quiet study space.

“Let’s say you have five siblings,” said Steiner, “there's no decent food on the table. You're sharing a space with six other people. There's no quiet place to work. None of your family has ever been past high school. They don't understand why you're not at home looking after your younger siblings, which is what they need you to be doing.”

Steiner also points out that students who get a job to make money while they are in school could also lead them to have less time to focus on high school work.

Data shows that the Bronx has the highest dropout rate of students who are economically disadvantaged, which Steiner found not to be surprising as the Bronx has a high poverty rate in NYC. However, the Bronx has the second-to-last lowest dropout rate of students who are not economically disadvantaged. That might mean when students are not in poverty in the Bronx, they actually are doing fine in school compared to other non-economically disadvantaged students in NYC.

Steiner also gave more interesting ideas of factors that can lead to dropout. He believes that people have gotten out of the habit of socialization, and so it's harder to be in school. Also, there is a lot of research that shows that big exposure to social media is a problem. It reduces attention spans, and makes it more difficult to focus in school and do the homework. So social media is clearly a contributor. Moreover, in the sense of isolation, if a student has the sense that no one cares whether he or she is at school or not, that's a big turnoff too.

In a broader sense, Steiner brought up that the system doesn't create an incentive for hard work except for the elite, who are obviously trying to get into top schools.

“For most of them (high school students), they would get B's, go to the state college or whatever it is, said Steiner, “But there's not that sense. In most of the world, there's an immediate linkage between how well you do in school and whether you're going to go to college or not, or whether you're going to go into a good career.”

Although some states are trying to challenge this issue, for example, Wisconsin announced that if a student is in the top 5% of his or her graduating high school, he or she would automatically go to the flagship university. However, “in many states, there's no obvious link between, you know, exam performance and getting into college,” said Steiner.