Analysts: Higher Dropout Age Won't Fix Schools

Excerpt from Lisa Gartner's article.

Making kids stay in school until they are 18, as President Obama proposed during his State of the Union address, wouldn't do much to address the nation's educational woes, said analysts with an eye on the Washington area.

Obama called on state legislatures to enact laws forbidding students to drop out of high school until they're 18, a requirement some states already have set, while many others adhere to a younger standard. "We [...] know that when students aren't allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma," he said.

But education analysts say raising the mandatory age to 18 from 16, another typical benchmark, can come at enormous cost while research only shows marginal benefits -- if the law is enforced at all.

"It's not the slam-bang that it looks like," said Russ Whitehurst, director of Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, an independent think tank. "It's not like you raise the age to 18 and they're going to go ahead and graduate -- they're just going to stay in school."

Virginia and the District are among more than a dozen states that require kids to stay in school through their 18th birthdays -- or graduation, if they're 17 come June -- while Maryland allows students to drop out at 16.

Maryland's K-12 system has been ranked top in the nation by Education Week for four straight years, while the District tends to fall at the bottom of the pile, although officials have been working to increase graduation rates.

"You don't see achievement patterns or success tracking along these compulsory age requirements," said Elena Silva, senior policy analyst for Education Sector, an independent D.C. think tank. "That would suggest the compulsory age of 18 doesn't make a difference."

She suggested that instead the government fund programs to track attendance patterns and absenteeism to address the dropout rate...