It's not that drop out rates are below 50% in "inner cities"; it's below 50% in cities period.

[readmoreoften]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080401/ts_alt_afp/useducationsociety_080401184532;_ylt=AiQ58OW9AHZa8r9L0ZqAc9es0NUE

This is being played off like there are certain gang-infested neighborhoods that have lower than 50% graduation rates. No. It's CITYWIDE. As in all of NYC put together. All of Los Angeles. About 27% of high school students are dropping out of school in the suburbs.

So in a few years, 1/3 of the population of the US won't have high school diplomas. Now that's hopeful.

[AngryAmish]

1. What are they going to do with their lives?

[bdamomma]

3. enlist in McSame's endless wars

God, this is so disgusting, so sad.

[villager]

2. straight out of Vonnegut's "Player Piano"

Keep everyone doped up in slums, while the machines and the execs do all the work...

[heidler1]

4. IMO what needs more attention is proving to the kids that this really matters.

I was the youngest and the only one out of five kids that did finish H.S. and those that did not finish also had successful lives. There were doors open it me that did not open for them, but they ended up as self employed and were good at it. I too finally at 52 went into business and did well also, but they did it sooner by necessity. We all had the advantage of having a self employed Father.

[Laughing Mirror]

5. A whopping 34.6% in Baltimore, and 24.9 in Detroit!

In spite of all those charter schools and special schools, magnet schools and so on and so forth, only a small percentage of the students is able to tough it out. The real reasons most of the kids don't want to stay, sometimes can't stay, in school, are not being addresed.

I dropped out too in order to get an eduction, and that was more than 35 years ago. A lot of students did. Schools were already horrible back then, a reflection on what kind of a community we were living in. Things seem to have gotten worse. The quality of life in the schools & communities has not improved apparently, and has even deteriorated further. The poor are getting poorer. No wonder we have 2.5 million people behind bars.

[Hannah Bell]

6. Partly through statistical massaging.

Do you really believe 30-50% of HS students in the US drop out?

Do you see that happening in your neighborhood?

Where is it reflected in the country-wide graduation rates the gov uses in comparisons with other countries?

Look into those figures.

If they get a GED, if they graduate early or late, if they move, it shows up in the #s for the year as non-graduation.

We had this as a big headline in our city, because the bush admin publishses its list of "failing schools." Supposedly all the HS's in the city were "failing" according to NCLB stats, with stunningly low grad rates.

Further investigation showed this not to be the case.

NCLB is designed to turn every school, every district, into a "failure," & these reports serve the same purpose that the periodic reports on the SS "crisis" do.

[readmoreoften]

10. I ABSOLUTELY see it in my neighborhood.

In my neighborhood, school barely has 85% attendance in the first week. The families are so poor that they need their children's income to survive. You're 14--time to work!

[fed-up]

7. I know other studies mark someone as "dropped out" if they move and finish HS elsewhere nt

[Igel]

8. That's one reason to have uniform methodolgies for determining drop-out rates.

At the same time, if you look at all the schools together, transfers shouldn't matter. If "my" school has 10 kids "drop out" and go to "your school", then your number will be increased.

Early at late graduates would average out.

If you sum all the entering 9th grade cohorts and, 4 years later, compare them to the cohort finishing 12th grade, you get a good enough number. Ideally, you then add in GEDs--there's no way to figure out which cohort to distribute them to, but if the GED numbers don't vary much by year it shouldn't matter much.

[Igel]

9. The wonders of averages.

It raises the question, however, as to what the standard deviation is, and other properties of the distribution.

It may be 54% overall, but for a given school it might be lower or higher. Is there a pattern to the distribution? After all, some schools in NYC have high graduation rates; these have to be offset by lower rates elsewhere, if the average is true.

Moreover, those are just public schools. When I lived outside of Baltimore a good acquaintance (let's not call him a 'friend') commuted daily to a private school in the city. Most of his friends were city-dwellers. They also count against the educational level of the populace at large; just not against public school efficacy.

Note that some have said that there's been at best small changes in overall public school graduation rates since the '70s. So 1/3 of the US population didn't obtain their public HS diplomas. I know among those I've tutored in English and reading, most didn't have their HS diplomas. My wife didn't. And I knew kids in my HS that dropped out. Does this strike me as reasonable? No, not now. Most of the people I know and talk to with any degree of regularity have at least their master's degree, and maybe a third have a doctorate. I know enough to surmise that my circle of acquaintances isn't a random sample.

On edit: Those going to private schools would show up as a net negative for the public school system, since we're only talking about public schools. So those numbers should also be included, if possible, to give a good picture.