Disturbing News on Dropouts

Yesterday was a busy day for the campaign. In the morning, I was on a panel at America's Promise's dropout prevention summit. The event focused around a new report that the Education Research Center released on high school graduation rates. The report details that only about one-half of the students in the 50 largest cities graduate with a high school diploma.

It is these school districts that account for nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of the 1.2 million students nationwide who fail to graduate with a diploma each year. As all eyes are on Pennsylvania – I wanted to point out that the Philadelphia City School District has a 49.6 precent graduation rate – 20 points below the national average.

This number is disturbing.

The report that the Education Research Center put out yesterday greatly illustrates the need for education reform in our country and I commend the work that America's Promise is doing on the ground. Gen. Colin Powell, founder of America's Promise, outlined their five "promises" yesterday. He said, "The Five Promises are those developmental resources — wrap-around supports— that young people need for success in life: caring adults, safe places, a healthy start, an effective education and an opportunity to help others.

I also think it's important to remember that prevention begins in grade school and any approach we take must be a comprehensive look at how we introduce quality teaching and quality experiences to the very young in our schools. We cannot only look at dropouts but we must also examine how well we educating those that do not drop out.

In addition to America's Promises' efforts, here are a couple things we ought to do to improve the entire K-12 education system. First, we need more rigorous standards. Currently, more than two-thirds of students attend class in states with mediocre expectations of what their students should learn. These low standards imperil America's economic security and make it difficult for students to compete in the increasingly competitive global job market.

We now rank 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in our performance in math; we rank 21st in science.  Benchmarking our standards to the top performing nations will guarantee that we're on pace to provide a world-class education to our youth.

Second, we need an effective teacher in every classroom. Over the next eight years America will need to hire nearly 3 million new teachers due to teacher turnover, retirement and increased student enrollment. We need national leadership to work with the governors to find ways to attract talented adults to the profession by offering teachers opportunities to earn advancement and better pay, provide incentives for effective teachers to take on difficult assignments, and fill critical shortages in subjects including math and science.

Comments

[Philadelphia schools supporter]

You write that Philadelphia City School District has a 49.6 percent graduation rate – 20 points below the national average and this number is disturbing.

I agree that the nation should do a better job of helping all kids graduate from high school on time.

But the same report you quote (which uses 2004 data) shows that the Los Angeles Unifed District has a graduation rate of 45.3 percent, much lower than Philadelphia.
In fact, LA's graduation rate is just one-tenth of one percent higher than New York City Public Schools (45.2 percent).