Dropouts
in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis.
Gary Orfield, ed. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Education Press, 2004. Pp. 306. $29.95, paper. ISBN: 1-891792-53-9.
TEL: 617-495-3432 • FAX: 617-496-3584
This is an important book about a problem of vital national importance. As
the author notes in his introduction: “Every year, across the United
States, a dangerously high percentage of students—mostly poor and minority—disappear
from the educational pipeline before graduating from high school. Nationally,
only about two-thirds of all students—and only half of all blacks, Latinos,
and Native Americans—who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas
four years later. For minority males, these figures are far lower.
“The implications of these high dropout rates are far reaching and devastating
for individuals, communities, and the economic vitality of this country. Yet,
because of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation rates,
the public remains largely unaware of this educational and civil rights crisis….
“Dropping out often leads to economic and social tragedy. High school
dropouts are far more likely than graduates to be unemployed, in prison, unmarried
or divorced, and living in poverty. A 2002 U.S. Census Bureau report, for
example, shows that the mean earnings of young adult Latinos who finish high
school are 43 percent higher than those of Latinos who drop out.
“A 2003 study based on U.S. Justice Department data reports that two-thirds
of prison inmates are dropouts, and that an incredible 52 percent of all African
American male dropouts in their early thirties have prison records. A 2003
report on the Chicago job market shows that more than half of young adult
male African American dropouts in that city have no jobs at all.”
“More and more of our future workers are from racial and ethnic groups
whose young people are having severe difficulty finishing high school. About
one-sixth of American students are African Americans, and slightly more are
Latino. The proportion of students of color in our nation’s schools
is rising; by mid-century, whites are likely to make up only two-fifths of
the total school-age population. Black and Latino students are highly segregated
by both race and poverty, and for many Latinos the separation is intensified
by linguistic isolation.
“The schools where these students are increasingly concentrated have
low achievement levels, often lack qualified teachers, and tend to lose most
of their students as dropouts. When students begin to have the problems that
are strongly predictive of dropping out, no one does anything. Often no one
even notices. In the worst cases, these students are encouraged to leave.
No one cares enough to make an honest report on how many students are lost,
how many lives are ruined.
“These students are the future of many of our cities and rural communities.
If we write them off, they will find ways to live—ways that will often
be destructive to the core values of our communities. The reality today is
that we are ignoring the issue because of misleading data, of prejudice against
poor and nonwhite adolescents, and because there are no simple answers to
these tough questions.”
“National [graduation] statistics are … misleading. In June 2004,
for example, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report claiming that ‘high
school graduation rates reach all-time high,’ based on a national survey.
Yet studies we present in this book report that these data are seriously inaccurate,
particularly for minority students, and do not begin to describe the conditions
in the nation’s large urban centers and in the rural South.”
“We put great pressure on our schools to raise test scores and very
little to ensure that students graduate. Congress took a first step in recognizing
the severity of the dropout problem by including graduation rate accountability
provisions in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Unfortunately, the
requirements of that part of the law are being widely ignored…. The
Department of Education subsequently issued regulations that allow schools,
districts, and states to all but eliminate graduation rate accountability,
and not even to report graduation data for minority subgroups.
“In contrast, annual improvements on test scores for all racial groups
are required. Most state and local statistics are worthless and misleading
in reporting this disaster. Very little federal or state money is devoted
to dropout prevention or even getting accurate numbers. The result is that
a school district can be honored and praised for raising its test scores even
when it is pushing low-achieving students out of school in order to raise
average scores.”
Not only do the contributors to this book describe the nature and scope of
the dropout crisis, they discuss some of its causes and some things that can
be done (and are being done in some school districts) to reduce the problem.
For example, chapters such as “Locating the Dropout Crisis: Which High
Schools Produce the Nation’s Dropouts?” and “Why Students
Drop Out of School” discuss some of the causes of the problem.
Chapters such as “Preventing Dropout: Use and Impact of Organizational
Reforms Designed to Ease the Transition to High School,” “What
Can Be Done to Reduce the Dropout Rate?”, and “Essential Components
of High School Dropout-Prevention Reforms” discuss things that can be
done to ameliorate this crisis.
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