1 In 10 US Schools Are "Dropout Factories"

AP:

It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That description fits more than one in 10 high schools across America.

"If you're born in a neighborhood or town where the only high school is one where graduation is not the norm, how is this living in the land of equal opportunity?" asks Bob Balfanz, the Johns Hopkins researcher who coined the term "dropout factory."

Read the whole story: AP

Comments

[fedupnburnin]

In view of what is happening these days, what sense of a future does a kid have? The local newspaper here featured an article about a guy who graduated from college with a Master's Degree. Unable to find work in the field he had trained for he became homeless. Another article more recent was about a 30 year old man who killed himself because of debt incurred from student loans and not being able to find a job after a year of looking. He had a degree in chemistry. Even those that get an education don't fair too well. My niece, not able to find a job that pays enough to support her and her 2 small boys moved in with me. When the boys are asleep I look at them and wonder what it's going to be like for them. I feel a great deal of sadness for them. I don't know what to do.

[Ilvfredum]

You can't start out as president of the company. Might oughta getta job and work your way up.

[Lelu]

Get those kids some "Learn Mandarin" CD's.

[themodernleader]

In the 1940's and 1950's the dropout rate was about 40 percent by the time of graduation from high school. Students who dropped out of high school were quickly absorbed into entry level jobs in the vibrant industrial and farming economy.
Now the real resources alloted to mass education beginning with preschool vastly eclipses that golden period in American history. So what is the problem.
First, the school districts have become concentrated from 18000 to about 3000 more or less. Gigantic, unresponsive and stagnating bureaucracies of a robber baron mentality of top "professionals" and their policies and procedures assures that every dollar goes into the welfare of the educators rather than the tools and educational instruments for improved teaching and learning. Public educators have become the masters rather than the servants of American democracy.
Second, students are reared in a milieu that projects organizational decline. Students recognize early that, unless born in affluence, the future for a job with a future is bleak at best. There is little motivation for those at the lower half of the economic pyramid to strive when the schooling leads to a dead end. Low student motivation and declining societal opportunity, growth and development go hand-in-hand. Dropouts have become a festering unacknowledged wound inviting unprecedented prison populations and unsettled, unsafe, insecure communities.
The only winner in the past 60 years has been the creation of a MANDARIAN EDUCATIONAL CLASS with cradle to grave benefits exacted from oppressive taxation on a disappearing middle class.

[gcallaghan]

Wait for the press conference.

Codpiece in Chief will use these numbers, smirk at the cameras and say, "See, my programs does work. Only out of ten childrens dropped out, that's like one percent."

[johnmorgan]

No, what's more likely, from the neoconservative point of view, is that this will be used as another excuse for "privatizing" public schools, that is, giving even more public monies to private corporations.

[Gary47]

Go get 'em, Mr. No-Child-L­eft-Behind­.

[Ilvfredum]

No-child is really a Ted Kennedy idea, Bush let Kennedy draw up the plans. Remember Bush ain't that smart.

[mrcontinental]

The numbers will continue to rise, count on it.

[Ilvfredum]

In the land of the free, you are free to be stupid.

[MovingtoNorway]

Or enlist in the military to get your GED

[Ilvfredum]

Or join a gang.

[Paul]

Even good American high schools can't compare to average ones in Europe.

Our school systems reflect the low priority put on education and it will ultimately hurt our competitiveness.

[Ilvfredum]

Make the teachers join a union that will fix it.

[OnTheCusp]

It doesn't matter whether they graduate high school or not...they are mostly dumber than dirt. To wit, I had a 23 year old job applicant in my store recently who did not know what a dozen was. Really! She had no idea what a dozen was. "I've heard of it, but I don't know how much that is," she said shrugging her shoulders. No wonder the rest of the world rightly claims that (most) US citizens are idiots.

[TimN]

More accurately, one in ten families are dropout factories.

[johnmorgan]

Yes, some people in this thread are blaming teachers, or teachers' unions, for huge societal problems.

I work as a substitute teacher, and I've been in many schools and school districts. I've almost only seen very dedicated and professional teachers. But good teachers can't undo all the injustice in American society.

[TimN]

As an NCO in the USAF I quickly realized that the all the dedication and professionalism in the world cannot undo 18 years of bad parenting.

[rue]

The schools are not the problem. American society is the problem. Schools are a reflection of the society in which they exist. When America heals itself, schools will function better, too.

[godlessclif]

The No Child Left Behind law cause the dropout problem and you know it.

[Fuji]

Uh, no. The drop-out rate has been a problem for ages now.

[baylaw73]

An educated populace does not best serve the needs of the financial power elite. Since they are the ones who control this country through their front operation, the Republicrat Party, ain't nuthin' gonna change.

[GhostintheMachine]

Education Levels of Recruits

We find that, on average, recruits tend to be much more highly educated than the general pub­lic and that this education disparity increased after the war on terrorism began.

If one single statistic could settle this issue, it is this: 98 percent of all enlisted recruits who enter the military have an education level of high school graduate or higher, compared to the national aver­age of 75 percent.[5­] In an education context, rather than attracting underprivileged young Americans, the military seems to be attracting above-average Americans. What remains to explore is whether this pattern of military enlistment is (1) consistent across ZIP codes, (2) consistent across all branches of service, and/or (3) consistent proportionally across all levels of education.

The claim could still be made that highly edu­cated recruits are being pulled from underprivi­leged areas, marked by below-average high school graduation rates. Further analysis shows that any such claim would also be incorrect. We used the binary measure to make a ZIP code?level compari­son. By comparing the records of 183,288 individ­ual recruits from the 1999 cohort, using ZIP code of origin, against other Census populations by ZIP code, our analysis shows that roughly half (48.5 percent) of enlistees came from three-digit ZCTAs with above-average national graduation rates. The other half of enlistees came from areas with below-average high school graduation rates.

Regardless of ZIP code area, we also find that enlistees are almost universally better educated than the general population. In all but one of the 885 three-digit ZCTAs, the graduation rate for 1999 recruits was higher than the graduation rate for non-recruits ages 18?24. In 2003, recruits had a higher graduation rate in every ZCTA. Figure 2, by using a gray scale to show the intensity of the educational gap, clearly shows that recruits are often better educated than the general population.

[fact finder]

ghost; Educated people are more likely to think for their selves than uneducated people. If you will take the time to do the research you will see that even though the fighting has be done by the poor people it is the middle class that starts a revolution. Poor,less educated people are more apt to believe what their leaders tell them and therefor are easier to control.

So the solution is to kill or totally indoctrinate the middle class males. What you have left are those who are very easily lead.

How do they get the middle class to enlist.? First: make jobs, good jobs unavailable for them.

Second: Offer large enlistment bonus's.

Third; Keep them in the war zone until they are dead, disabled or just plain nuts.

Then you have it made . Just put your private Military group, Read BlackWater etc. on the ground to keep order and that is it.

[GhostintheMachine]

A pillar of conventional wisdom about the U.S. military is that the quality of volunteers has been degraded after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Examples of the voices making this claim range from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Daily News [1] to Michael Moore’s pseudo-documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Some insist that minorities and the underprivileged are over­represented in the military. Others accuse the U.S. Army of accepting unqualified enlistees in a futile attempt to meet its recruiting goals in the midst of an unpopular war.[2]

A report published by The Heritage Foundation in November 2005 examined the issue and could not substantiate any degradation in troop quality by comparing military enlistees in 1999 to those in 2003. It is possible that troop quality did not degrade until after the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, when patriotism was high. A common assumption is that the Army experienced difficulty getting qualified enlistees in 2005 and was subse­quently forced to lower its standards. This report revisits the issue by examining the full recruiting classes for all branches of the U.S. military for every year from 2003 to 2005.

The current findings show that the demo­graphic characteristics of volunteers have contin­ued to show signs of higher, not lower, quality.


Indeed, in many criteria, each year shows advancement, not decline, in measurable qualities of new enlistees. For example, it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. This claim has been advanced without any rigorous evidence. Our review of Pen­tagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005.


http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/cda06-09.cfm

[amanda85]

"Education Levels of Recruits"

Unsubstantiated propaganda garbage.

[1will]

Do you have a link backing that up?

[Quaoar]

The Bush Crime Empire needs cannon fodder for Iraq and Iran and wherever it seeks to extend it's influence.

[1will]

What kind of neighborhoods feed into these schools? What are the parents of these High School kids like? Both likely contribute the greatest amount towards the dropouts.

[johnmorgan]

Yes, of course you can't just blame the schools. The parents have a lot to do with it. Also, many American schools, especially inner-city ones, are horribly funded and are falling apart and can't retain good teachers. Moreover, young people know that there are no good jobs out there anyway for high school graduates.