NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana and its local school districts must not let tight budgets diminish promising efforts to lower the state’s high school dropout rate of around 17 percent and boost graduation rates in a state that sees barely over two-thirds of its entering freshmen finish school in four years, a nonpartisan research group said Tuesday.

The Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana released the results of its study of the dropout problem during a news briefing in Baton Rouge, noting statistics showing that dropouts suffer higher unemployment, lower earnings, poorer health, higher rates of criminal behavior and a greater likelihood of needing public assistance than those who finish school.

PAR’s report reviews numerous education initiatives undertaken over the years. Some are aimed at improving schools overall, including the school accountability and high-stakes testing programs approved in the 1990s and the move to numerous charter schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Others have been aimed specifically at the dropout problem, including a system of electronically tracking student progress called the Dropout Early Warning System that has been made available to local districts.

And there has been some progress. The report notes a slight decrease in the dropout rate and a small increase in the graduation rate in recent years.  “We have had a good trend,” PAR president Robert Travis Scott said in the briefing with Karen Rowley, the report’s primary author.

But there are various roadblocks to progress, the report noted. For instance, not all local systems have administrative data systems that can be used with the Dropout Early Warning System software.

Meanwhile, responsibility to curb the dropout problem is falling more heavily on local districts. A state Department of Education reorganization relies more heavily on local districts and their willingness to implement programs, the report says, while state’s base funding formula for local districts has not increased since the 2009-10 school year.

“The local districts have to find ways to restructure their resources to implement the programs the Department of Education believes will help improve their dropout and graduation rates, and they have to do it with less flexibility in their budgets,” the report said.

Gathering information on what works is key to deciding where to spend more money, the report said, although that isn’t always easy. It said Louisiana’s much-lauded data collection system gathers information useful to local districts. But policy decisions are complicated because the data are stored in 26 different systems that don’t communicate with each other. A statewide data repository is nearing completion, the report said.

Money should be targeted at programs that work. “It may seem rather obvious that we should continue to put our efforts behind successful programs,” Scott said. “But in fact what we see is that in a lot of cases in a difficult funding environment, some of these programs have been neglected or else have not been brought up to the scale that they could be to help address the problem.”

Highlighted in the report are several examples of programs undertaken in specific school districts. For instance, Ruston High School in Lincoln Parish is one of the schools that has established a “Freshman Academy” to help ninth-graders adjust to high school life. The report notes that studies indicate most dropouts leave school in their freshman year. The academy is aimed at preventing dropouts by easing the transition into high school.

In Ascension Parish, the report said, the superintendent has established a “school turnaround zone” aimed at identifying and addressing students’ weaknesses.

Among other strategies, the report took note of legislation adopted amid controversy at the Legislature in 2009 creating a “career diploma.” Students pursuing a career diploma face a less rigorous lineup of courses and can proceed to ninth grade without passing the eighth-grade “LEAP” promotion tests.  Backers said it will cut dropout rates; critics decried it as a lowering of standards.

Too new to evaluate now, the program must be monitored to ensure that it is not only keeping students in school but preparing them for work, PAR’s report said.

Also discussed  in the 75-page report is the state’s multifaceted effort to raise the graduation rate from less than 68 percent to 80 percent by 2014. It notes a major focus is the 50 schools where the dropout problem is deemed largely the result not of student inabilities but of boredom, discipline problems or “catastrophic” personal events.

The report notes the plan has 17 “distinct elements” covering many options.  “Department officials do not expect every school to use every dropout prevention and career readiness program. Rather, the 80 percent strategy offers a menu of options from which district administrators and school principals can choose according to what they believe will be most helpful.”