An Educational Oil Spill

Buried beneath the recent avalanche of coverage about the oil spill, the Al-Tipper split, Helen Thomas, and other news of note is a little-remarked-upon issue that has more profound long-term implications for this country's health and prosperity than health care reform, banking reform, or any other reform. It's this:

When graduating seniors across the country walk across the stage this month to receive their diplomas, more than one-fourth of the kids they started high school with won't be in cap and gown with them. They dropped out.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics recent report, "Public School Graduates and Dropouts from the Common Core of Data: School Year 2007-2008," 25 percent of all students, and nearly 40 percent of the nation's black and Hispanic students, fail to graduate high school on time.

In Jacksonville, Florida, where I host a daily call-in talk show on NPR member station WJCT-FM, the high school dropout crisis, and quality of the public schools overall, has gone from just one of many pressing issues facing business and civic leaders to a top concern, thanks to the Florida Times-Union's decision to commit its top journalists to an ongoing long-term "civic journalism" project, "City of Hope," looking at the havoc wrought by decades of poor public education here on the First Coast. The newspaper is issuing a call to action to the entire community to finally get serious about improving educational outcomes for our kids -- (one example of "old media" showing continued relevance.)

Jacksonville, in addition to being known for its challenged schools -- Duval County has the highest percentage of students attending private schools of any Florida urban school district -- is also known for being the Sunshine State's murder capital, although crime rates have started to decline as of late.

These two massive social problems are intricately intertwined, which was brought home to me one morning when a highly placed business editor tossed off this aside in our studio just before going on the air: "We've got every asset in the world to attract business to this area -- the beaches, the St. Johns River, great climate, business-friendly. But the crime rates don't look good, and in particular, major corporations aren't going to want to relocate to a city where everyone who can afford it sends their kids to private school and the graduation rate's only about 60 percent."

To be fair, Jacksonville has a number of outstanding public schools, including some nationally ranked magnet schools. But too many others, especially the schools in poorer, historically African-American neighborhoods, are struggling. Several may even be closed if their rankings don't soon improve.

Liberals blame lack of funding and conservatives blame family breakdown and the teacher's unions for this sorry state of affairs. Meanwhile, kids here and around the country are continually shortchanged while the two sides bicker about what to do to solve the problem. On a small scale, here on the First Coast, middle-class families are fleeing the city in droves for nearby St. Johns County -- ("For the schools, of course," said our former next-door neighbors as the moving van pulled up into their driveway and they waved goodbye). The tax base continues to drain away, family by family. "When are you guys going to make the move to St. Johns?" said another neighbor recently. "You know you can't send your kids to the public high school in this district."

Writ large, documentary films like the upcoming "Waiting for Superman" are laying out in depressing detail the terrible cost of failing to educate our children properly. Poor employment opportunities for millions of citizens. A dumbed-down electorate. Other countries eating our lunch in the tech race.

Governor Charlie Crist recently vetoed a controversial piece of legislation here in Florida that would have reformed teacher pay and tied it more closely to student performance. Critics said the measure was draconian and would drive talented teachers out of the profession. Supporters cried that the status quo is unacceptable and that ANY change at this point should be supported to get more students graduating from high school, ready to join the 21st century workforce.

All this, as Florida continues to rank dead last, 50th out of 50 states, in what it spends per capita on public education funding. At the start of June, the Sunshine State applied for a second-round Race to the Top education grant, seeking $700 million from the federal education competition to improve the nation's schools.

Federal commitment is certainly valuable, but for how much longer will our kids be waiting for an educational Superman to swoop down and finally address this problem?

 

Follow Melissa Ross on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MelissainJax

Comments

[Harry Featherstone]

03:23 PM on 06/10/2010

The United States has lost from our public schools hundreds of thousands students, dominently age 11 to 15 again this year. Hundreds of thousands who will go to selling or eating illigal drugs, working their lifes as short order cooks, waitress or construction. With little education we will see them in our prisons, on the streets, selling in retail or as people who do not work. I was a short order cook and sold magazines as a teen ager. Look at the kids who are playing in the yards, in the streets, in the schools and you see brains working and young lives enjoying the world. Then we lose them in the 8th grade and we see them as listed above. We lose not only the children we lose the abiltiy to create. The ability to set a goal of being a president of a company, lose the ability to innovate and be heard by others. Melissa Ross says it in her Huffington Post opinion. Are we going to look at this and say so what can we do? Are we going to change the future. A famous saying is "When you take on changing the world, bet on the world". Lets change that saying.

[Jack Bobeck]

09:20 AM on 06/10/2010

Yes the Duval County Schools continue to be an issue, but I firmly believe we need to see where the money goes for each school. By the way, we just spent 85 million on a new high school. Could we have spent that money better by leasing out space in commercial buildings? With so many buildings available, I see that there are more options available to us. Does it make more sense to lease space, than hold onto space? Could we share athletic fields with the park system, libraries with the Jax Public Library, why do we need to have seperate systems for the City and School systems? We all know costs will go up, so if pensions are allowed, let's find ways, together as a community, to use the resources we have available and use the dollars to add more teachers, more options, and to do this, we need people who are willing to look outside the same old boxes we have had for hundreds of years.

[Live4literacy]

07:11 PM on 06/08/2010

You can look south to Sen. Thrasher who has every intention of trashing public education in this state. It's a great game...funnel public school into private schools and charters and you have successfully killed public education in Florida. We all know which public schools are bad.the majority of people are very happy with their neighborhood public schoosl. We love ours here in Broward County. We also know which ones to avoid and it has nothing to do with the quality of teacher( although after a while of beating your head against a wall and be blamed for every ill that has befallen these students, anyone with half a brain will get out), but everything to do with the quality of student, parental involvement or lack thereof, and yes, money. Go into any of "those" schools and you will see a lack of computers, books, manipulatives, etc. While no one wants to talk about this, somehow we have to trash the whole system for what seems to be fairly obvious. Invest in smaller class size, more support for families, and specialists in those schools that have struggling students and leave my public school alone. And yes money is a problem when schools here in Broward County are completely cutting p.e., music, art, and media because there is not enough money to keep them. This state pays lip service to education because a dumb populace cannot even learn how to punch a ballot correctly.