PHOENIX (AP) -- Arizona educators continue to struggle to keep students in school, though the state no longer dwells at the bottom of national surveys of dropout rates.

Johns Hopkins University found that 17 percent of Arizona high schools qualify as "dropout factories," a term it uses to describe schools where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year.

South Carolina and Florida led the nation with the highest percent of dropout factories in their school systems, while Utah had none. The national average is 12 percent.

"The fact that we're somewhere in the middle of the pack is a sign of progress," said retired Arizona State University President Lattie Coor, who helped create the Center for the Future of Arizona in 2004 to combat with the state's dropout rate.

Coor said families in Arizona tend to move around more often than other parts of the country, and educators have had trouble tracking them. As a result, it's especially tough for some students to readjust to their new surroundings and get placed in appropriate academic programs.

"Stability has a value in allowing students to focus and concentrate and succeed," he said.

"Students who don't end the year in the same school in which they began have greater difficulty with the continuity in instruction. Students who move frequently in general have a lot of other factors to deal with, often socio-economic factors that caused the movement."

Coor said Arizona needs to get better at monitoring students, and it should spend more money per student.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said fixing Arizona's dropout problem has been a priority since he took office in 2003. Horne said he hired an official to focus on Arizona's dropout rate, and schools are doing a better job persuading students to finish high school.

"I think we get an A-plus-plus for the improvement we've had over the past five years," Horne said. "We have a very well organized, effective dropout program."

Horne said his office has conducted a "best practices" survey and created a Web page highlighting peer counseling, mentoring, career and technical education programs that helped some school districts retain students.

The state also supervises 39 dropout prevention grants that can help schools create new programs, Horne said.

"We do everything we can to help," he said. "We say, 'Here are programs that work that we can help you copy.'"

The Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, which previously has ranked Arizona among the worst in the nation in dropout rates, noticed an improvement this year in Arizona's dropout rate.

Its latest Kids Count Data Book showed that 9 percent of all 16-19 year olds were high school dropouts in 2005, compared with 18 percent in 2000. In 2000, Arizona ranked 40th in the nation in dropout rates. In 2005, it rose to 36th.

"There's definitely been improvement across the country," Laura Beavers, a foundation research associate said. "Even relative to other states, Arizona is doing better."

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