“As they grow into their teens, many (students) gradually come to the realization that for them, the so-called American Dream is no more real than John Henry’s hammer or Cinderella’s glass slipper. It is a gringo myth, a textbook fable. As kids come to internalize this, (they) feel their options narrowing,.." Gregory Michie, Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher & His Students, p. 140.
Introduction
UCC Resources...
Description of the Graduation Rate Crisis...
Important Research Reports...
A New Way to Measure the Dropout Rate...
Introduction...
Children need to know they are valued. They need to feel important and to have activities that make them feel challenged and excited about learning. They need to have the opportunity to work with adults who care about them. Finally they need to feel they are connected in a real way to a bright future.
The reasons children and adolescents fall behind in school are many. First there are outside-the-school issues—poverty; lack of access to health and mental health care; lack of access to enriched early education; a culture that glorifies materialism; racial and economic disparities in the systems that serve youths; family mobility; lack of transportation to enriching activities. The list goes on and on. Then there are issues like uneven school funding that reflect society's failure to invest publicly in our nation's poorest children, and a federal education law that punishes rather than builds capacity in the schools that serve America's poorest children. Finally there are the lessons children learn at school that are never spoken—the hidden curriculum that reflects attitudes about authority, attitudes about ways of learning and knowing, and attitudes that identify some students or cultures as more or less desirable. Children internalize the messages their schools convey. Achievement gaps and dropout rates across America—at the most basic level—reflect whose children America is most willing to throw away, for public schools are primary civic institutions that are likely to embody the same biases as the culture of which they are a part.
Even though achievement gaps and graduation gaps are complex and multivariable and must therefore be addressed from many angles, in the church we can educate ourselves about their many causes and we can take steps to support equitable and ample public investment and to reduce bias and racism. As people of faith we can find ways to demonstrate that we care collectively for our children, through all kinds of partnering and mentoring and through being advocates for legislation that supports public schools and helps create a nurturing developmental environment as well as excellence in the curriculum.
UCC Resources...
Both articles in the 2009 Message on Public Education explore causes of dropping out of school.
Witness for Justice columns explore high school graduation rates.
Plummeting High School Graduation Rates, September 15, 2008 Witness for Justice
Dropouts: Children Left Far Behind, February 20, 2006 Witness for Justice
Description of the Graduation Rate Crisis...
Research demonstrates that large-city schools that serve poor and primarily children of color are failing in many cases to graduate even 50 percent of the adolescents who enter their doors four years earlier. In virtually every case the schools with the worst records are in America's poorest and most segregated core cities. Examples from the 2008 Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation, from the America's Promise Alliance, are graduation rates in:
Detroit 24.9 percent
Indianapolis 30.5 percent
Cleveland 34.1 percent
Baltimore 34.6 percent
Columbus 40.9 percent
Minneapolis 43.7 percent
Dallas 44.4 percent
New York 45.2 percent
Los Angeles 45.3 percent
Oakland 45.6 percent
Important Research Reports...
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June 2009:
Putting Middle Grades Students on the Graduation Path "demonstrates that the middle grades matter—tremendously. During the middle grades, students in high-poverty environments are either launched on the path to high school graduation or knocked off." Robert Balfanz, the author, further reports that "One of the fundamental drivers of the nation's graduation rate crisis is the concentration of our neediest students in a subset of largely under-resourced schools... In the high-poverty middle schools feeding the high schools that produce most of the nation's dropouts, up to half, and sometimes more, of the students need extra supports to succeed. In these schools, there are simply not enough skilled adults to help the students in need."
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The Real Truth about Low Graduation Rates, The Urban Institute Education Policy Center, August 2004.
For an exploration of the reasons students drop out, consult the resources of
the Civil Rights Project, particularly
Dropouts in America, a book edited by Gary Orfield, which demonstrates the importance of critical reading and academic skills by the end of eighth grade, and the rapid dropping out in ninth and tenth grade of students who are academically behind and chronically truant.
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Does the No Child Left Behind Act increase the dropout rate of students who are behind? A
new study from Rice University in Texas demonstrates a direct connection between the demand that high schools rapidly raise standardized test scores and the dropping out of very vulnerable students. The researchers demonstrate a direct correlation between growing dropout rates and school policy to retain in ninth grade students predicted to fail so that their scores will not tarnish tenth grade exam passage rates. Students disappear when they realize they are never fated to graduate even if they attend class.
A New Way to Measure the Dropout Rate...
The reports above measure dropouts by comparing the number of students entering ninth grade to the number who graduate four years later. Traditionally, school districts have been able to report numbers without actually determining whether a child moved or was ill, or whether an adolescent has given birth?or has entered juvenile detention. Historically we have merely trusted the data provided by the schools when children disappear. Until two large studies were conducted in 2004, it had been assumed that most American adolescents were graduating on time. Then Chris Swanson at the Urban Institute and Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters at Johns Hopkins University released studies that compared the number of students entering ninth grade to the number graduating four years later. With slightly different methodologies, these social scientists identified a factor they called "promoting power," the ratio of freshmen to graduates four years later. In April, 2008, the America's Promise Alliance launched an initiative to expose America's dropout crisis, using the same indicator. In fact the America's Promise research was conducted again by Chris Swanson.
