Hope despite bad graduation rates

By RICK DALTON

May 02, 2008 04:00 am

— A recently released report by America's Promise Alliance revealed that only about half the students in our largest cities are graduating from high school. In the last few days, there's been lots of media talk about the crisis this report has exposed. Colin Powell, who chairs America's Promise, said that the dropout situation is "more than a problem, it's a catastrophe."
Although Mr. Powell is right, this is old news, and it's even worse than you think. Nationally, high school graduation rates peaked at 77 percent 40 years ago and have languished at around 67 percent the last two decades. Nearly two years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued similar findings when they revealed graduation rates of 40 percent in New York and Baltimore and an abysmal 20 percent in Detroit.
This worsening crisis affects all of us. Dropouts cost the nation $84 million in lost income-tax revenue each year, while each dropout costs his community, on average, an additional half-million dollars over a lifetime in public assistance, incarceration and health care.
Consider also that in just 10 years there will be 20 million unfilled jobs in this country because we don't have enough educated citizens. America is slipping globally; among 30 nations, our tenth-graders ranked 17th in science and 25th in math.
Why all this bad news? Low-income children -- not only those who populate our cities but those in rural America, as well -- are lagging behind their middle- and upper-income peers. In fact, the education gap has widened every year since 1980. A child born into the lowest economic quintile is four times less likely to graduate from high school and 10 times less likely to graduate from college than a child from the top economic quintile. Yet America's fastest-growing population is low-income, often Latino and black, children. While this under-served cohort of students is burgeoning, jobs globally are increasingly requiring higher levels of education.
What we're seeing is the perfect storm for domestic disaster.
So what's being done to address this crisis? Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings responded to the America's Promise report by saying that she will require states to provide more consistent dropout data, so we can "compare how students of every race, background, and income level are performing."
We already know the answer, and we've heard this strategy before. It's the mantra of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education program of the Bush Administration, that requires schools to disaggregate test-score data by race and income.
It just so happens that last month, a study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas found that the Texas School Accountability System, the model for NCLB, contributes directly to low graduation rates, with a disproportionate number of dropouts being African-American and Latino.
These mainstream strategies aren't working and are, in fact, exacerbating the dropout crisis. It's time for America to take a different approach to solving our educational crisis. Here are four key steps.
1. We need high expectations for all children. My organization has shown time and again that if we set high expectations children rise to meet them and the converse is also true. Rather than focusing on "not leaving children behind," let's focus on moving them forward, getting them to college and ensuring them success once they get there.
2. We need to instill hope in all of our children. One reason Barack Obama resonates with our younger generation is his message of hope. Our children need to see college and the American dream as something they can attain, not something that's available only to the wealthy.
3. Once children believe that the dream can be theirs, then they can aspire to and plan for college.
4. Hope and aspirations are the foundation for better performance. In our work, we encourage our students to improve their attendance and grades, steps over which they have control, and steps that lead directly to higher educational achievement.
I've seen these steps work in low-income schools nationwide, from urban centers like Honolulu and New York City to rural regions like the Adirondacks and Appalachia. Fifteen thousand under-served students participate in College For Every Student programs, and over the last two years 97 percent of those who were high school seniors have gone on to college.
The educational crisis exposed by America's Promise is not confined to urban centers. It is an urgent national problem that affects us all. It's time for us to reach out and extend a hand to America's under-served children, and move them toward college with high expectations, hope for their future, raised aspirations and, ultimately, higher academic achievement.