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EDUCATORS KNOW that when students are held back — sometimes repeatedly — they often end up dropping out of school. "Grade retention is the leading predictor of whether the student drops out," says Daniel Losen, legal and policy research associate for the Civil Rights Project. "Kids leave because they don’t want to hang in there year after year after year," adds Rice.

But dropouts don’t matter to the school district — at least, as far as MCAS and NCLB are concerned. NCLB was supposed to demand improvement in graduation rates as well as test scores, but Secretary of Education Rod Paige — over the objections of several civil-rights groups — dropped that requirement. "I don’t think any school should get off the hook if they have high test scores but only a third of students are graduating," Losen says. But they do. States are required to report graduation rates, but are not judged by them. (Those reports must include graduation rates for subgroups, including Hispanics, but Massachusetts does not yet comply. The state Department of Education says it will do so by 2006.)

Perhaps as a result of this, we’re now seeing subtle — and some not-so-subtle — tactics designed to move students who don’t do well on standardized tests out of the classroom altogether. Last fall, the deputy superintendent of the Boston Public Schools sent a memo to every high-school principal and headmaster in the district, encouraging them to "request that overage students be case managed out of existing placement" — that is, to rid Boston’s public schools of students who are two years behind in course credits for their age. By April, such students will be transferred elsewhere; schools must submit plans showing how "overage students who were allowed to stay in district high school" will be graduated or transferred by next fall.

This initiative can be viewed as an attempt to move low-performing students into settings in which they’ll have a better chance of success, such as those available under Boston’s alternative-high-school diploma program, created in 1999. Here, students with jobs, for instance, might do well at Roxbury’s Boston Evening Academy, which offers "alternative learning culture" with 190 students. Others might want to enter the Adult Secondary Education program, at places like ABCD LearningWorks, in Downtown Boston, or at Bunker Hill Community College, where they can take high-school-level classes or work toward a GED.

But it’s also an easy way to get these students out of district schools, where they threaten to pull down test-score averages, says Rice. Especially when school districts in other states, including Texas and New York, have been caught driving students — particularly Hispanic students — out of their schools with little concern about what happens to them. In New York, a legal challenge forced the city’s schools to take back 5000 Hispanic students who had been sent letters that led them to believe, falsely, they were no longer allowed to attend public school.

Unfortunately, Hispanic parents are often ill-equipped to act as agents for their children’s educational interests, despite their best intentions. According to federal Census data, 42 percent of adult Hispanics statewide have no high-school diploma. In Boston, the rates are even higher. Hispanics in Boston — who now make up 14.4 percent of the city’s general population, up from 10.8 percent in 1990 — are more likely to be newer immigrants from Central and South America. About a third of the state’s Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans live in Boston, and over 70 percent of them are immigrants, according to the Mauricio Gastón Institute at UMass Boston, a leading research center for Hispanic and immigrant issues. Parents from such backgrounds tend to have less education and speak less English at home than third- and fourth-generation Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans, who can be found increasingly outside Boston in places like Brockton, Lowell, Salem, Somerville, and Waltham — and even New Hampshire, where the Puerto Rican population doubled from 1990 to 2000.

Hispanic parents bring other cultural differences to the table that leave them ill-equipped to work the system on behalf of their children. "The culture in Latin America says that you trust the teacher," says at-large city councilor Felix Arroyo, who is a former president of the Boston School Committee. "You transfer that attitude to a very different culture where you have to advocate for your child, and they end up without the services they have a right to."

Besides, Rice charges, the Boston school district has a history of ignoring the Hispanic graduation-rate problem, in large part by placing the onus on parents. "Given the choice of really educating parents about the options available to them, or just rolling over, it’s a lot easier for the district to roll over and do nothing," he says. Rice points to the new English-immersion law as an example, charging that Boston stopped providing help for its older limited-English students, rather than offering the transition required by statute. "In theory, at the high-school level [limited-English students] could still be getting native-language instruction if they request it," Rice says. "But BPS didn’t do a good job telling the parents that, so it’s all English instruction now."

Such neglect goes back for years. In November 1989, the BPS adopted — on paper — a Hispanic dropout-prevention program, with a list of prevention and intervention strategies. But "it was dead on arrival," Rice says.

"I am angry about it, because they know what to do and they won’t do it," says Arroyo, who agrees that the 1989 program — among others — was never implemented.

The prevention strategies outlined in that program started in preschool. They included outreach activities to bring Hispanic children into early-learning programs, and research designed to purchase preschool curriculum materials designed for that population. Tutorial support, staff-development efforts, and targeted curriculum materials were recommended for the earliest grade levels, and at-risk students were to be identified by the third grade.

Intervention strategies included an ambitious mentoring program for Hispanic students in grades six through nine; a cultural-awareness program throughout the Boston Public Schools; a professional-development plan for all BPS principals and headmasters; collaboration with community agencies to provide services to parents (including job training, counseling, child care, and transportation); and family-support teams for at-risk students.

Instead, the biggest reform under consideration in the Boston Public Schools these days is a push to change the school-assignment policy. Increasing the number of school zones in the city from three to nine, as some are now discussing, would inevitably lead to more segregated schools. As it stands now, at many public elementary and middle schools in Boston — including Winship Elementary in Brighton, Tobin Elementary and Middle in Roxbury, Curley Middle in Jamaica Plain, and Otis Elementary in East Boston — Hispanic pupils account for 60 percent or more of the total students.

The Civil Rights Project study found that, regardless of the district’s entire racial and socioeconomic make-up, the more a district’s students are clustered into schools by race and ethnicity — the "segregation index" — the worse the graduation rate. "Independent of poverty, racial isolation contributes to lower graduation rates," says Losen. And as far as Orfield is concerned, "Neighborhood schools will make it worse." Changes to busing, such as increasing the number of zones within which students can be moved, will tend to increase the segregation index, he says.

All of which means that a few years from now, the city may look back on the 30 percent graduation rate for its Hispanic students as — believe it or not — the high-water mark.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com