The Dropout Crisis: Not a Problem After All

So, maybe this whole dropout thing isn't as terrible as we thought. 

Or so says Steve Blow in his Dallas Morning News article, published yesterday. 

"Here's my guess," he writes, "Most kids who drop out manage to become productive citizens anyway." Later in the article, Blow declares, "Look around. Lots and lots of jobs require only a basic academic education. Let's tailor some schools to match those students and those jobs." 

He's right - there are a lot of jobs that require only a basic education. But are those the jobs that provide livable salaries, that come with health care benefits, that include a 401k plan? 

Most likely not. 

The point of education - which Blow misses - is to give our children options for the future. We must prepare them for any career path that they choose. Students should be equally prepared to choose to become auto mechanics as they would be to become pre-med students. There is nothing wrong with having a job that doesn't require a lot of education, but children must be able to opt out of these jobs and not be forced into them. 

I'm pretty sure that Blow has never heard the phrase, "the soft racism of low expectations." Unfortunately, that is just what he is promoting. 

Preschool: The Magic Dropout Prevention Technique?

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Latino students enter high school. Four years later, less than 60% of them graduate. Nationally, Latinos represent one of the highest dropout rates of any ethnic group; dropping out at a rate much more frequent than White or Asian students.

Today, the WaPo features Jay Matthews's reflection on dropout intervention strategies - and the effectiveness of each. The most "impactful" program appears to be a preschool program, where students spend 1.8 years in a preschool which has small classes and requires parental involvement. This program yielded 19 "extra" high school graduates for every 100 students who participated. Other programs relied on class size reduction, teacher salary increases, etc... but check them out for yourself.

What Matthew's rightly notes is that only one of the programs profiled can actually be instituted by high school educators - the rest are for K-8 schools.

Even so, it is interesting to me to see that the most effective program is a preschool program. This validates the correlation between Latinos' dropout rates and their lack of preschool education (Latino children in the US are the least likely to receive early childhood education). It also gives us some clues as to where we should focus our resources when trying to address the Latino dropout crisis.

School Choice and Hispanic Dropouts

The National Center for Policy Analysis has a report out about how school choice can decrease the number of Hispanic dropouts in the US.

I certainly think that the report could be more thorough; for example, its mentions only charters and open enrollment public schools as "choice options" (no private schools, homeschooling, virtual schools, etc.). That said, it is a good and very basic primer for anyone interested.