Tale of Two Districts: Best, Worst of Times : * Santa Ana, Irvine on Opposite End of Dropout Scale

On the face of it, a recent federal report concluding that two adjacent cities, Santa Ana and Irvine, had the highest and lowest high school dropout rates in the nation might seem to suggest something about the problems and successes of particular school districts. And the result carried a startling twist--the best and worst nationally are located next door to each other.

Well, this is not really a story about how well individual school systems are doing their job at all. It is more a story about Orange County and how much it has changed. It is about the juxtaposition of poverty and plenty, of opportunity sitting side-by-side with socioeconomic obstacles.

Long portrayed as a bastion of conservative, white suburbia, the county has undergone substantial demographic change in recent years. And it has some of the same stark contrasts within its borders that can be found in other metropolitan areas around the country, where extreme poverty and urban problems may be separated from manicured suburban lawns by only a set of railroad tracks or a freeway overpass.

Indeed, the Costa Mesa Freeway divides Santa Ana, with its large immigrant population, from Irvine, one of the most affluent areas of the county. The department’s fourth annual report to Congress found that 36.7% of Santa Ana teen-agers 16 to 19 years old were high school dropouts in 1991, more than three times the national average. Irvine, only minutes away on the Santa Ana Freeway or down Edinger Avenue, had a rate of only 2.1% in the federal study.

It is important to note that both cities’ school officials disputed the notion that this data was any reflection of their schools’ performance. The U.S. Department of Education’s census-based survey of the nation’s 250 largest cities didn’t really address the efforts by the schools to deal with dropouts.

The reason is that the National Center for Educational Statistics based its findings on the proportion of students in a community who had not completed high school and were not currently enrolled. So that takes in a larger pool.

As Rudy M. Castruita, superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District, pointed out, the numbers included immigrants who moved to Santa Ana and never intended to enroll in school. Irvine concurs that the report was more a snapshot of who lives in the cities at a particular point in time than any reflection on how well the schools are going about cutting the dropout rate.

Santa Ana, in fact, has made a very admirable and successful effort recently to keep its youngsters in school--in spite of national dropout rates for Latinos that have remained high during the last 20 years. According to state figures, Santa Ana’s attempts have paid off well; between 1986 and 1991, the district cut the dropout rate by more than 17%.

But Santa Ana’s frontal assault on the dropout rate itself is a telling confirmation of the extent of the problem--even if the figures in the national study reflect more the overall makeup of the city than the student body.

And even if this tale of two cities is basically a profile of two very different communities, it is shocking for its juxtaposition of wealth and poverty and of opportunity and disenfranchisement. No community nowadays is an island. The problems of one turn out to be the problems of all.

Keeping kids in school can improve life in our suburban pockets of poverty. And improving education, while providing affordable housing and better opportunities, inevitably will benefit the entire region.