April 07, 2008News & Politics
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.
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.
