No Child Left at All? Report Shows Stunning U.S. Drop-Out Rate

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 10:27 AM on April 7, 2008.

I shouldn't be surprised to see that this story about the appallingly low graduation rates in the cities of America is being underreported. Reporting this story is facing up to the ugly underbelly of America, and the way that the conservative backlash against the great liberal reforms of the mid-20th century has quietly managed to recreate the America that Republicans dream of, with a huge gap between the rich and everyone else, and a large and growing undereducated underclass. The Women's Take post optimistically addresses attempts to reduce the dropout rate, but I'm going to point out that the numbers are so high that we have to accept that the high dropout rate in certain cities is a feature, not a bug, of the various educational "reforms" that have been touted over the years.

If you read the report by the EPE Research Center (PDF), you'll see what I mean. We don't have kids falling through the cracks. The crack is the point, and the kids who stay on the surface are the minority. Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis all have graduation rates under 35 percent. That's not dropout rates -- that’s graduation rates. And there are 17 major U.S. cities that have graduation rates below 50 percent. But even more sobering, and what shows what's really going on here, is the comparison of the graduation rates between cities and suburbs.

There are numerous, complex factors that feed these alarming drop-out rates, but we can't let the deliberate machinations of the system that encourage dropping out for certain students off the hook. Underfunding urban schools is a big part of the problem, of course, the major one. But there's two big reforms that sound good on paper, but in practice appear to be sculpted with an eye towards encouraging certain populations of students (the working poor, especially racial minorities) to drop out. Standardized testing is one of those mechanisms. "Teaching the test" to improve statistics is mind-numbing regardless of your district, but in places where a lot more students are marginal, it is bound to increase the drop-out rate. Being bored out of your skull and not receiving a real education would make anyone toy with the idea of dropping out, but for kids with a lot more factors in play encouraging dropping out, it's often going to be more incentive.

Then there's "zero tolerance", another idea that sounds good on paper, because it makes a rough sense that teachers shouldn't spend all their time disciplining a handful of problem kids to the detriment of the learning experience for everyone else. But in reality, it's going to be selectively enforced, despite the "zero" part of its name. In some parts of the country, selective enforcement of zero tolerance is all but resegregating the schools. We've all heard horror stories of kids being expelled or put in in-school suspension for having aspirin on their persons, for talking in class, or other minor infractions. What we don't hear so much is how the kids who get selected for this kind of zealous disciplinary action are targeted for classist and racist reasons. Civil rights groups like the ACLU, the SPLC, and the NAACP call it the "school to prison pipeline" -- the idea being that by hounding certain students with zero tolerance punishments while letting others get off with lighter punishments for the same infractions, you encourage the former group to drop out, which increases the likelihood that they'll get involved in crime and end up in prison. The ACLU has a fact sheet I highly recommend reading.

This story is not a small one, but a major issue. Dropping out of high school all but condemns someone to a permanent spot in the underclass, and the few people who do manage to escape that fate usually have other privileges to help them out. And considering the relationship between the drop-out rate and the likelihood of going to prison, we must consider the increase of pressure to drop out provided by zero tolerance and "No Child Left Behind" to be a feeder into the prison-industrial complex.

Tagged as: education

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.