July 21, 2005
Education's Collateral Damage
New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
Stop the presses! Within just a few days we've had a scandal
involving a world-class presidential guru bumped off the front pages
by a prime-time presidential announcement of a nominee to the Supreme
Court.
No one would argue that these aren't big stories. But an issue that
is even more important to the long-term future of the U.S. gets very
short shrift from the media. In an era when a college education is
virtually a prerequisite for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, an
extraordinary number of American teenagers continue to head toward
adulthood without even a high school diploma.
This is not a sexy issue, and certainly not as titillating for
journalists as the political witchcraft that Karl Rove has used to
enchant George W. Bush. But consider the following from the book
"Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis," a
collection of essays edited by Gary Orfield, a professor at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education:
"Nationally, only about two-thirds of all students - and only half of
all blacks, Latinos and Native Americans - who enter ninth grade
graduate with regular diplomas four years later."
In much of the nation, especially in urban and rural areas, the
picture is even more dismal. In New York City, just 18 percent of all
students graduate with a Regents diploma, which is the diploma
generally required for admission to a four-year college. Only 9.4
percent of African-American students get a Regents diploma.
Over all, the United States has one of the highest high school
dropout rates in the industrialized world, which can't be comforting
news in the ferociously competitive environment of an increasingly
globalized economy.
"It's terrifying to know that half of the kids of color in the United
States drop out of high school, and that only one in five is prepared
for college," said Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, which is making a big effort to boost high school
graduation rates and the number of graduates who are prepared for
college.
Why is the education of America's young people so important?
"It may sound like hyperbole," said Mr. Vander Ark, "but this is the
economic development issue for our society, and it is the social
justice issue of our times. It is the most important long-term issue
for the civic health of the republic.
"In the aggregate, we need more young people educated at higher
levels: more finishing high school, more finishing community college,
more finishing four-year degrees. And secondly, I think it's very
important that we close the racial and socioeconomic gaps in
educational attainment.
"We're seeing a scary level of income stratification that is the
result of educational stratification. And it's becoming important not
just for the economy but for our society that we help low-income
[students], and especially kids of color, achieve high levels of
education so that they can participate in the economy and in our
society."
Citing statistics from a variety of sources, officials at the Gates
Foundation have noted that:
High school dropouts, on average, earn $9,245 less per year than high
school graduates.
The poverty rate for families headed by dropouts is more than twice
that for families headed by high school graduates.
Dropouts are much more likely to be unemployed, less likely to vote
and more likely to be imprisoned than high school graduates.
For those concerned about the state of leadership in America, and who
wonder where the next generation of leaders will come from, I can
tell you it's not likely to emerge from the millions upon millions of
dropouts we're setting loose in the land.
And whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, if you'd like to see a
wiser, more creative and more effective approach to such crucial
problems as war and peace, terror, international relations,
employment, energy consumption and so on, you'll need to rely on a
much better-educated and better-informed population than the United
States has now.
I don't think Mr. Vander Ark was engaging in hyperbole. The public
needs to understand the extent of the high school dropout crisis, and
its implications for the long-term future of the U.S. It will most
likely have more of an impact on the lives of your children and
grandchildren than George W. Bush's appointments to the Supreme Court.
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