TIME: Dropout Rate Actually 30%, 50% For Blacks/Hispanics - '06 Issue!

[Dems Will Win]

Wow.

A 50% dropout rate for blacks and Hispanics. Talk about total failure. Another issue for the Dems, especially to win back the Hispanic vote. NCLB is a total failure, high school has only gotten worse, especially because it never gets the funding the earlier grades now receive.

This is a disaster, creating a permanent underclass--which is just the way the big corporations and the GOP want it so they can have CHEAP LABOR. This article talks about "Pushouts", kids who are ENCOURAGED to drop out by their schools! How rich/good kids get all the attention while it is the others who actually need it.

Most of all the students are BORED to death by the curriculum and the rigid rote learning approach. Most dropputs HAVE GOOD GRADES! They leave because the kids don't like them or mainly because they are BORED. All that shaping the curriculum to the SATs and other tests has KILLED EDUCATION. In addition, the high school curriculum structure was created in the 1820s! (Blame Johann Herbart if truth be told) It's a little out of date...

We need to push these dropout numbers in the '06 election to show exactly how, under the GOP, this country is literally coming apart at the seams. When was the last time the corporate news interrupted the War on Terra long enough to give a 30-second report on the dropout rate?

What is the GOP Education Plan? STAY THE COURSE. Big '06 Issue!

Of the 315 Shelbyville students who showed up for the first day of high school four years ago, only 215 are expected to graduate. The 100 others have simply melted away, dropping out in a slow, steady bleed that has left the town wondering how it could have let down so many of its kids.

In today's data-happy era of accountability, testing and No Child Left Behind, here is the most astonishing statistic in the whole field of education: an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly 1 out of 3 public high school students won't graduate, not just in Shelbyville but around the nation. For Latinos and African Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50%. Virtually no community, small or large, rural or urban, has escaped the problem.

There is a small but hardy band of researchers who insist the dropout rates don't quite approach those levels. They point to their pet surveys that suggest a rate of only 15% to 20%. The dispute is difficult to referee, particularly in the wake of decades of lax accounting by states and schools. But the majority of analysts and lawmakers have come to this consensus: the numbers have remained unchecked at approximately 30% through two decades of intense educational reform, and the magnitude of the problem has been consistently, and often willfully, ignored.

...

In 2001, Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published a study that peeled back the layers of statistical legerdemain. Poring over raw education data, he asked himself a basic question: What percentage of kids who start at a high school finish? The answers led Greene and subsequent researchers around the country to place the national graduation rate at anywhere from 64% to 71%. It's a rate that most researchers say has remained fairly static since the 1970s, despite increased attention on the plight of public schools and a vigorous educational-reform movement.

NOTE: YOU REALLY HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE THING (first link easier to read) --

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2006/American-Dropout-Nation17apr06.htm

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1181646-1,00.html

Remember to recommend for Greatest if you think these dropout rates are an '06 issue. If you forget, I'm going to make you write "Dems Will Win" on the blackboard 100 TIMES.

[Tunkamerica]

1. Shelbyville is a town full of misfits...

....remember when they stole that lemon tree?

[Dems Will Win]

4. Springfield's Dropout rate is worse than Shelbyville's though

Bart will never make it through the Herbartian curriculum, I bet. That's mostly because Herbart was born in 1776, and he's the guy that thought up this boring curriculum. Gee that's a long time ago.

I have hope for Lisa, though.

[U4ikLefty]

10. At least Speingfield has the original Millhouse!!! n/t

[NOLADEM]

16. Dont forget about North Haverbrook, Ogdenville and New Ogdenville

By Golly.

[kenny blankenship]

11. Whattaya expect? They split off of Springfield for one reason:

to marry their cousins.

[napi21]

2. I blame their family for this high drop out rate.

All children should be raised to understand, from a very young age, that dropping out of school is simply NOT an option!

I understand the divorce rate in the US is around 50% too. What does that tell the kids? If you don't like something, just quit!

When my hubby worked for a manufacturer in SC, one of his employees told him "Well, my son finally quit school today!" When asked why he let his 16 YO kid quit school, he said "He was never good at it, and now he can go to work down at the corner gas station and start makin' some money!" I felt sooo bad for that kid, and have never forgotten that day.

[Deja Q]

5. Agreed.

:thumbsup:

[Dems Will Win]

8. Yes but even when the parents don't encourage

they dropout because the outdated curriculum, the boring textbooks and all the testing BORES THE KIDS TO DEATH.

Videogames are a hell of a lot more interesting and fun.

We need to make high school a fun and nurturing place to learn in, not a mental dungeon.

[napi21]

14. Awe comeon. Think back to when you were in school.

I think we all had a favorite class, or at least I hope so, but can you honestly sayschool was FUN? I sure can't! I remember the happiest day of my school years was the VERY LAST day of high school!

[Nozebro]

12. Too many "leaders" of those groups share the blame but are never called

to account for NOT doing more to encourage families and children to appreciate the advantages of getting educated. It's almost as though the "leaders" PREFER to have their "followers" be illiterate.

[Dems Will Win]

15. The GOP got their education policies from Himmler:

To prevent the birth of a new generation of educated Poles, German officials decreed that the schooling of Polish children should end after a few years of elementary education. "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable," Himmler wrote in a May 1940 memorandum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_ethnic_Poles

[david_vincent]

18. Good point, DWW

I recommend the book School for Barbarians by Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter. It's about how the Nazis ran public schools. Makes for really scary, and thought-provoking, reading.

[SoyCat]

24. My former BIL didn't even know that two of his children had stopped

attending school until they had missed five months. He didn't even seem concerned that they had quit. One got his GED and the other attended adult high school a couple of years later and received a high school diploma. Neither one attended college.

[Yupster]

3. Dropout rate

is one of those statistics that you can measure five different ways to get five different results.

My district just measures a dropout if the kid comes and tells the school that they're dropping out.

If a kid finishes sophomore year and just doesn't show back up for junior year he's not considered a dropout. The explanation is that how do we know he didn't move to another district?

Since that's how most kids dropout, the official rate is pretty meaningless.

[brokensymmetry]

6. K&R Essential reading!

Absolutely disasterous trends.

[Supersedeas]

7. "No" Child left behind...scores down, dropout rate up...Go W

[Dems Will Win]

9. A mind is a terrible thing to W -- Vote Democratic!

[whistle]

13. NCLB has created a massive lumpenproletariat class...

<snip>
Lumpenproletariat

Roughly translated as slum workers or the mob, this term identifies the class of outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In times of prolonged crisis (depression), innumerable young people also, who cannot find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, are pushed into this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some area of the mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all layers of a society in decay. <read more> http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/u.htm

<also see>

http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/index.php/Huey_P._Newton_::_Philosophy_::_Lumpenproletariat

http://leroy.cc.uregina.ca/~gingrich/s28f99.htm

[Dems Will Win]

17. kick

[Dems Will Win]

19. kick

[lebkuchen]

20. Schools in LA County have a 50 +% dropout rate

Van Nuys in particular. That is disgraceful.

A study was done to followup on the dropouts. What were they doing now?

Nothing, at least nothing productive and contributive to society.

In Germany, education systems are tiered, placing students in schools in accordance with their grade point average and academic abilities. You don't just drop out and sit at home. You either get training at the next lower level, or retake courses and continue on at the higher level.

[Igel]

21. The problem is that the problem isn't new.

It goes back at least to the '70s, when most kids *didn't* have videogames, and cable tv wasn't all that common. The rigid curricula result from the drop out rate; you have the causation reversed.

Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II have all had the same problem, with approximately the same dropout rates.

Education spending has more than doubled. Take out the additional money spent on the disabled or challenged, and there's still a hefty increase. Take out the money spent on computers and physical plant upgrades, there's still an increase. Increased spending doesn't track with increased performance for the lower 50% of the students.

This covers the period from whole-word to literature-based to phonics-approaches to reading. It covers the old math, new math, and new new math. It covers a wave or two of critical thinking fads, and making things 'relevant'. It covers a few different 'executive level' reports on the problem. It covers an increase in certified teachers, and more attention made to having teachers be experts in their subject matter.

The subject matter for one group of kids is getting easier to make sure they *can't* have problems with how hard the curriculum is, while it's getting harder and harder for another group. The old tracking system is in place under another, much less nuanced and effective, guise. People are simply running out of plans and approaches, and recycling approaches that didn't work last time under neat new names.

What's needed is either altering the kid's culture and attitudes, and those of their parents, **or** thoroughly restructuring the schools so that the kids that would drop out learn how to fix cars, drive bulldozers, weld, cut hair, or learn office protocols.

[sandnsea]

23. It is an old problem, I agree

I don't think there ever has been a particularly high national graduation rate, back before the 50's most kids went to work in their teen years and it was no big deal. There's also plenty of school to work type opportunities and I don't think that is reaching the drop-out group either. What's missing is the notion of developing a skill, a craft, and that it takes many years and real dedication. We turn kids out of high school or trade school, they're expected to go earn a living in a society where entry level wages don't even pay the rent. A lot of kids, boys particularly, don't even know how to get from 16 to earning a living, working fast food or retail isn't going to do the job. So even if we were to do restructuring, there will have to be a lot of worker advocacy to go along with it.

[riderinthestorm]

25. I wrote in another thread that I suspect the problem may lay with

the parents/family/American societal structure as well.

Families used to participate in education at home to a far greater degree than we do now. Oh, for sure it wasn't called that but it was: critical thinking skills were tested and applied during discussions of politics, current events, civics and more around the dinner table. Weekend jaunts were common to local historical sites (forts, museums etc.) instead of endless soccer games sucking down the time on the weekend. Math, business and social skills were honed while assisting in the family business (whether farming or shopwork), learning to play a treasured instrument happened at home via grandpa. Whatever. Wealthy families would take their children abroad travelling, to the opera and symphony - you name it. In other words, families were an important part of academic success - many parents don't seem to recognize that anymore though.

Since the 60s our social revolution has been in full swing: some things are definitely better, some things we are discovering just aren't going to work. We haven't figured out the end of the social overhaul yet (which is why social conservatives are so frightened) but I believe that the diminishing academic success of America's students is a part of it.

[AspenRose]

22. Re: Pushouts

"This article talks about "Pushouts", kids who are ENCOURAGED to drop out by their schools! How rich/good kids get all the attention while it is the others who actually need it."

I KNOW that was happening in my predominately white high school in the 80s. My guidance counselor could have cared less about my college aspirations, even though I had good grades and was of color. I did that legwork myself, because I was the first in my family to go to college and my parents were overwhelmed working their jobs overtime and didn't have a CLUE about where to begin the process. And the counselor was NO help at all. NONE.

I even had TEACHERS on my behalf telling the counselor to promote me to honors level classes because my grades and test scores said that this was where I should be....only to have her sit on her ass and do nothing.

Still makes me mad thinking about it, and it was over 25 years ago. :nuke:

[Dems Will Win]

26. Boredom is the KEY FACTOR for dropouts, not bad grades

The article notes that a Gates Foundation survey found two very surprising facts about dropouts. 88% of those surveyed said they had passing or even good grades, so that difficulties with their classes was not a key factor. Yet the surprise over that finding was surpassed by the shock that came when dropouts were asked why they stopped their education.

The number one reason dropouts cited for leaving high school? Boredom.

This disastrous fact naturally raises the question: Does High School have to be boring? Where does the current curriculum get off-track and what can be done to make school interesting and--dare we say it--fun?

Beyond making school more interesting--is it not time to step back and take a look at the Big Picture. Is High School, especially in the US, meeting the true needs of the society and the students who attend it? What kind of change is required, for example, so that High Schools produce graduates able to create a workable and sustainable future? We will see that the answers to these questions are critical--for the current curriculum needs more than updating or minor changes in its approach.

A total 21st Century transformation is in order.

Why is the current curriculum so boring to so many? There are many factors, such as lessons that teach toward the test, boring presentations by teachers, and horrendous cuts in education funding. The main reason, however, is that the courses themselves are outdated and irrelevant to society's current needs. It is difficult to see how many of these courses are relevant to today--because in fact they are not relevant.

The present curriculum is a product of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and was heavily influenced by the needs of the Cold War. Just as the military of the West is still geared to fighting Cold War enemies that no longer exist, the educational system is not meeting the pressing challenges of the 21st Century.