Who's Minding the Neighborhood? The Role of Adult Capacity in Keeping Young People on a Path to Graduation
Author: Zaff, Jonathan F.
Date: 2016-10-11
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Academic Persistence,Dropouts,Student Attrition,Hypothesis Testing,Intervention,Adults,Census Figures,Community Involvement,Metropolitan Areas,Gender Differences,Socioeconomic Influences,Geographic Location,Dropout Rate,Program Effectiveness,Databases,Elementary Secondary Education,Teacher Student Ratio,Statistical Analysis,Age Differences,Racial Differences,African Americans,Whites,Hispanic Americans,Role Models,High School Graduates,Graduation Rate,Neighborhoods

As of 2014, four percent of all 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States had left high school without graduating for a total of 690,000 youth. The current rate of youth leaving schools represents a decline from a high of approximately fourteen percent 40 years ago. The possible reasons for improvement include improved academic measurement and accountability systems, persistent action within states and districts, and the use of evidence-based strategies for putting and keeping young people on a positive academic trajectory or reconnecting them to that trajectory if they have fallen off (Civic Enterprises &amp; Everyone Graduates Center, 2016). This paper focuses on a different perspective for why the rate of youth leaving high school has improved: people. The researchers in this study hypothesize that more adults in a community--adults who nurture, socialize, teach, and are role models for youth--will result in more young people on a positive pathway to adult success. Using Decennial Census data from 1970-2010, researchers examine whether the adult capacity in a community can be implicated in the reduction in the rate of youth who leave school within neighborhoods in metropolitan areas throughout the United States. The study focuses on metropolitan areas because urban school districts have historically had the lowest graduation rates, with suburbs and rural districts having the highest rates. The analyses is based on research and theory suggesting that community capacity is associated with the developmental outcomes of that community's youth. The study uses a community's adult-to-youth ratio as a proxy for a community's adult capacity. Results show strong evidence that increasing these ratios would result in a substantive improvement in rates of young people leaving school in metropolitan areas in the U.S. The most conservative estimate finds that a one percent increase in the ratio is associated with an average decrease in rate of youth leaving school of one percent. This effect is larger in communities with higher shares of African-American residents and higher shares of male residents. In addition, findings reveal that the effect is larger in higher income communities, so increases in adult capacity alone may not be sufficient, and will be most effective when accompanied with increases in a community's endowment of resources. As a foundation for this study, researchers also examined the trends in rates of youth who leave high school and assessed whether these trends varied by region, state, city, and zip codes within cities. Results show that: (1) There has been a steady improvement in the rate of youth leaving school in the United States since 1970; and (2) Although there have been improvements in the average rate, there is substantial between-state, within-state, and within-city variation in the neighborhood-level change rate. Rates of Youth Leaving High School without Graduating in the United States from 1970-2010 is appended. [For the Research Brief, see ED572739.]