Students Dropping Out of Puerto Rico Public Schools Measuring the Problem and Examining the Implications

In Puerto Rico, as in the United States, a very large number of students drop out of school. For the states, recent studies suggest that the dropout problem is much greater than usually acknowledged, with perhaps as many as one-third of all students failing to complete high school in the normal four years. The data for Puerto Rico tell a similar story, but in Puerto Rico the problem appears greater because the data indicate that a large number of students leave the public schools system before even entering high school. This report examines the school dropout issue in Puerto Rico, provides new estimates of dropout rates, and discusses the economic context and the implications of those estimates. The examination of the Puerto Rican school data and the estimates of dropout rates lead to the following observations: • Puerto Rico has a serious public school dropout problem. Even though officially reported public school dropout rates are extremely low, enrollment figures indicate that actual dropout rates are very high. • Although dropout rates are high in Puerto Rico, they appear to have fallen significantly during the 1990s and into the new century. Moreover, given that Puerto Rico's level of income is substantially below that of the states, we might have expected much higher dropout rates. • The Puerto Rican dropout problem appears to be especially severe for young students, those at the 7th and 8th grade levels. Whereas high school dropout rates appear to be no higher for Puerto Rico than for the average of the 50 states (and thus significantly better than for many individual states), the dropout rate in Puerto Rico for pre-high school students appears to be higher than in almost all states. Overall, then, from the 6 th grade to high school graduation, Puerto Rico is below all or virtually all of the states in its ability to engage and retain students. • Extremely high dropout rates before the mid-1990s have left a legacy of adults without high school degrees. Forty percent of adults over 24 lack a high school degree, significantly higher than in any state.