Are more kids dropping out of school these days?

July 18, 1:06 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

Previous Next

2 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Education Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

As anyone who follows education news knows, the California Department of Education has come up with a

new way to keep track of high school dropouts, an efficient new system replacing what seems to have been a hodgepodge of seat-of-the-pants methods and on-the-fly guesswork.

But even the world’s most efficient system can’t give us the full picture. The Los Angeles Times article reporting the new process included a line that made me nod my head sadly:

What is inescapable, ultimately, is that the effort to statistically capture the complications of teen life does not lend itself to the simple analysis that a dropout rate suggests.

And if you weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to be misled into believing that the dropout rate has risen over the years, or taken a jump recently. But of course that isn’t true in the big picture.

It used to be the norm for many working-class kids and almost all poor kids to drop out of high school -- if they started high school at all. Finishing high school was a luxury for the privileged.

According to Nicholas Lemann’s book “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” a history of the SAT and higher education in this country, the high school graduation rate only hit 50 percent around World War II.

My own grandmother, born in 1899 in Cumberland, Md., and raised in various spots in the Appalachians along the B&O Railroad line, was emblematic. She quit school after eighth grade to go to work in a glove factory in Columbus, Ohio. This was the norm for her culture, fully in accordance with her family’s expectations. It would have been an act of defiance and disloyalty for her to try to insist on continuing on to high school, let alone attempting to graduate – I’m sure it would have been futile for her even to try.

(I have mentioned that to people who have chimed in with the view that eighth grade was far more advanced than it is now. They’re wrong. While Grandma – who worked on auto assembly lines for much of her adult life and later became a hairdresser – was quite literate and loved to write letters, she also totally believed that men have one fewer rib on one side than women do, for example.)

There are still many families and many communities with the same expectation for their kids my great-grandparents had for Grandma: Your earning power is far more valuable than a piece of paper saying you finished high school. And of course there are families and communities struggling with many deeper issues too.

Today’s Chronicle story on the dropout issue quotes a community worker who gives a good view of the problem: “A lot of kids are dealing with issues far beyond their control.,” says Andre Aikins of San Francisco’s Omega Boys Club. But I have to disagree with Aikins’ implication that it’s the responsibility of -- or within the realm of possibility for – educators to remedy the situation. Educators’ role is to teach our children academics. The entire community – the entire society – must share responsibility to work to help low-income, at-risk students and families engage and focus in school. Here’s the section quoting Aikins.

At the Omega Boys Club in San Francisco, which has worked with school districts for years and earned a reputation for keeping boys and girls from dropping out and getting them into college, operations manager Andre Aikins says schools need to go beyond academics.

"A lot of kids are dealing with issues far beyond their control - Mom's on drugs, Pop's in the penitentiary, and now the grandparents are on drugs," he said. "A lot of kids have very little parenting going on."
Youngsters come to school like a full balloon, he said: They're so filled with troubles that "it's hard to add anything else, or they'll burst."

Schools are poorly equipped to help students with their emotional troubles, he said. But if they could find a way to do it, he said, the dropout rate would decline. San Francisco's dropout rate is 21 percent, according to the new state estimate.

"They have to change the mind-set of students to value education," Aikins said. "Right now, the way the system is designed - how can I say it - the kids don't see the value and relevancy of what schools are in place to do for them."

Meanwhile, everyone is poring over those dropout rate breakouts, school by school and district by district. They presumably fall in line with demographics – all the numbers show high dropout rates for African-American and Latino students. But as the Los Angeles Times line emphasizes, there are so many complexities that I’m not really convinced those numbers are clear indicators that one school is doing so much better than another.