Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report - S4

DROPOUT
REDUCTION

Daniel
P. King
SUPERINTENDENT
Pharr-San Juan-Alamo
Independent School District, Texas
BY LESLI A. MAXWELL

hen Daniel P. King took the helm of the
32,000-student school district he leads in Texas’
Rio Grande Valley in 2007, its three high schools had
just been singled out as “dropout factories” in a seminal
national report.
Three school board members and the outgoing superintendent had recently been indicted in a federal bribery case for accepting cash and other gifts in exchange
for awarding contracts. All four were later convicted;
two board members served time in federal prison.
Gang-related tensions were running high in the district’s secondary schools, causing violent incidents to
flare and attendance to plummet. And 23 high school
science teachers had resigned because of a mismanaged school redesign process that had bungled the
master schedule.
“The district was in crisis,” says King, 59, who grew
up in the Rio Grande Valley and has spent his entire
36-year career as an educator in that region. “I told
the board that if they wanted to individually influence
daily operations of the school system, they should not
hire me. I needed a lot of leeway.”
A little more than five years later, the Pharr-San
Juan-Alamo school system, located along the Texas
border with Mexico, stands out as a promising example
of how to turn around a district where low graduation
rates and sluggish academic achievement were the
norm for years. It’s also one whose demographics—99
percent Hispanic, 90 percent poor, and 41 percent in
need of English-language-acquisition services—are
more commonly linked to dropping out of high school
than entering and finishing college.
The starting point: The graduation rate by the end
of the 2006-07 school year was 62 percent, far below
Texas’ statewide average of 77 percent. Nearly 500 students (out of a total high school enrollment of 8,000)
had dropped out of school that year, and nearly half of
them were seniors who had fallen short by just a few
credits, hadn’t passed an exit exam, or were derailed
by a combination of both, King says.
By last June: The dropout rate had been slashed by
nearly 90 percent. More than 1,909 seniors earned di-

plomas in four years, bumping the district’s graduation
rate to 88 percent, roughly 10 percentage points higher
than the rate for all of Texas. And about 25 percent
of Pharr-San Juan-Alamo’s high school students were
enrolled in at least one course that could earn them
credit for college. Enrollment rates in higher education doubled for the district’s graduates between 2007
and 2010.
“It has been a massive shift in many ways,” says
Nora Rivas-Garza, the principal of the 2,000-student
Pharr-San Juan-Alamo High School, one of five in the

PRESIDENT &
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

EXECUTIVE PROJECT
EDITOR

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

SENIOR WRITERS

Virginia B. Edwards
Gregory Chronister

MANAGING EDITORS
Karen Diegmueller
Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

S4 |

LEADERS TO LEARN FROM www.edweek.org/go/leaders-report
EDUCATION WEEK • February 6, 2013

Debra Viadero

Lesli A. Maxwell
Christina A. Samuels

district. “But the biggest change is that we went from
a system where only the top 10 percent were expected
to go to college to one where all students are expected
to do so. Everyone hears about higher education, and
everyone is pushed, encouraged, and prodded to take
those courses that are going to put them on the path
to college.”
The first step in turning the district around, King
says, was a triage effort to restore order to the high
schools, and a push to build relationships with staff
members, school board members, parents, and a com-

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Caralee Adams
Diette Courrégé Casey
Michelle R. Davis
Alyson Klein
Michele Molnar
Erik W. Robelen
Stephen Sawchuk
Nirvi Shah
Sarah D. Sparks
Jaclyn Zubrzycki

DESIGNER, PROJECT LEAD
Linda Jurkowitz

DESIGN DIRECTOR
Laura Baker

DEPUTY DESIGN DIRECTOR
Gina Tomko

ASSISTANT DESIGN
DIRECTOR
Vanessa Solis

http://www.edweek.org/go/leaders-report

Education Week - February 6, 2013 - Special Report

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