Every time Oscar Ross hears the famous phase, “ a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” he starts to regret dropping out of high school.
Life has not been easy for Ross since leaving high school more than 20 years ago.
He has worked mostly factory jobs his whole life and had a few run-ins with the law.
“If I had to do it all over again I would have stayed in school. At the time it made sense to stop going because by doing so I was able to hang out more with my friends,” recalled Ross, 49. “And besides, I wasn’t learning much so I had little interest in my school work.”
Ross dropped out of John M. Harlan Community Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side at age 17 during his junior year. But Ross would have had to wait until he was 18 to drop out under new legislation proposed by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn.
The proposal would increase the legal age students can voluntarily drop out without parental consent to 18 from 17.
“Every child in Illinois deserves a quality education that will serve them throughout their lives,” said Quinn. “The best way to ensure that our children have the chance to achieve and succeed is to make sure they stay in school long enough to earn their diploma.”
Marielle Sainvilus, a spokeswoman for Chicago Public Schools, said while there is no data showing the average age of high school graduates she estimated it is 18. Illinois is one of 29 states that allow students to drop out of school before they turn 18.
And while the concept of making it harder for students to drop out sounds good in theory, for it to be a realistic goal the state also needs to increase funding for high schools, said Jean-Claude Brizard, chief executive officer for CPS.
“CPS supports initiatives that advocate for the education of students. (And) we generally support Governor Quinn’s idea, but if there are no plans to increase state funding, it will be difficult to accomplish this goal,” Brizard said.
CPS is the nation’s third largest school district with more than 400,000 students whose students are majority Hispanic and black. And according to CPS data, while its dropout rate has declined for the past three years it still exceeds other school districts in large, urban cities. At the end of the 2009 school year the dropout rate for CPS was 42.5 percent; 2010 it was 41.1 and 2011 it dropped further to 38.3 percent.
However, in other cities, the dropout rate was far less.
In Houston, which is the fourth largest U.S. populated city, according to census data, its current dropout rate stands at 12.6 percent and students must be 18 to dropout. In New York City, students need to be 16 to dropout and its dropout rate in 2010 (the last year data was available) was 12 percent.
Locally, William R. Harper and Wendell Phillips Academy high schools on the South Side had the largest dropout rate in 2009 with 63.1 percent each followed by Nicholas Senn High School on the North Side at 60 percent. A year later Christian Fenger Academy High School on the far South Side had the highest dropout rate with 67.9 percent followed by John Marshall Metropolitan High School on the West Side with 62.5 percent and Dyett High School on the South Side with 60.2 percent. And at the end of the 2011 school year, Fenger and Dyett had the highest dropout rate with 63.3 percent followed by Harper with 60.8 percent.
Elizabeth Dozier, who has been principal at Fenger since 2009, was unavailable for comment.
CPS officials said the district is attacking the dropout problem with several new initiatives.
“To address this, CPS has implemented several measures such as early warning indicator system to identify students who show signs of school disengagement and failure and prevent them from falling off track,” said Sainvilus. “Students are flagged for interventions based on the risk factors described above (attendance, grades, behavior), to help the district, networks, and schools to zero in on struggling students, and match them with appropriate supports and academic and social emotional interventions.”
But for Ross, dropping out of high school was too easy.
“They (school officials) made it too easy for me to leave school. I was told by a counselor that because I had missed too many days from school and had bad grades that I was going to be kicked out anyway,” explained Ross. “So that left me with little choice but to drop out.”
Now, counselors are hard to come by, said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
“Currently there is only one social worker for every 1,100 CPS students. At the high school level, there is one counselor assigned for every 360 students (730 total counselors) but according to the American School Counselors Association there should be about 1,600 counselors in our system,” said Lewis. “This is especially troubling considering 86 percent of CPS students are low income and 87 percent are African American and Latino, populations most at risk for high dropout rates. (So) if increasing the age of compulsory education to 18 does that, fine. (But) let’s figure out a way to keep our students engaged in school throughout their academic careers.”
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