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Ear to the Ground

High School Dropouts Aren’t Helping

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Posted on Jun 10, 2010
Flickr / Nic's events (CC-BY-SA)

A smaller percentage of American high-schoolers are making it through all four years, reports The Christian Science Monitor. Lower graduation rates add up to an economic loss of billions in wages and tax revenue and a gloomy future in competing with those overachieving brainiacs in China and India.

Extra credit: Read Mike Rose’s masterful assessment of the education reform hype machine here.

Christian Science Monitor:

The percent of students earning a standard diploma in four years shifted from 69.2 percent in 2006 to 68.8 percent in 2007, according to an analysis of the most recent data in “Diplomas Count 2010.” It was the second consecutive year of decline, says the report, which was released Thursday by Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center, a nonprofit in Bethesda, Md.

That translates to 11,000 fewer graduates in 2007 than in 2006. At its peak in 1969, the national graduation rate was 77 percent.

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rico, suave's avatar

By rico, suave, June 13, 2010 at 5:56 pm Link to this comment

I’m betting on the idea that kids are just as smart as they always were. What they see today in school isn’t preparation for life’s challenges, but indoctrination and propaganda- multiculturalism, moral equivalence, victimology, dependence on government.

Truly depressing shit. Why not drop out and go find a party?

Report this

By felicity, June 11, 2010 at 8:26 am Link to this comment

So the only pitfall to a drop in the number of kids graduating from high school is the potential drop in tax revenues?  Of course, this is America where money is the only value we honor.

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By sollipsist, June 11, 2010 at 6:09 am Link to this comment

Oh, I get it now:

lots of unemployed idiots = education failing

idiots with jobs = education working fine

Maybe, just maybe, part of the reason that we suck is
that we look for the economic bottom line in
everything.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that we actively
dismiss intelligence and reinforce lack of discipline
and victimhood.

Report this

By samosamo, June 11, 2010 at 3:02 am Link to this comment

****************

 

So, where is the incentive? You can get an education here in
amerika still, but what will it get you with the whole economic
system tied up in what were illegal monopolies? So what could
have and still to a certain degree is possible is to get an
education up to and through college and go seek a job or start
your own business. But beware, and this was thought out in
those conservative think tanks in the last 40 years or so, that
subverting the anti-trust laws, that should create an economy of
competition, it is now an economy of crushing or killing the
competition. Since our law makers ignore this turnaround as
does law enforcement and the departments that supposedly
over saw this, the economy has now turned into a employers
market where with the lack of real jobs(unless senator joe
doubleblow can find you one)and to a degree, illegal
immigration, even college graduates may have to under bid a
job just to become employed.

Besides, those dropouts are more intent on texting, cell phones,
ipods, ipads, iphones and other clutter that, why worry about
education, just text or call or whatever and ask someone.

Besides either no one really knows how to run a public school
anymore or the teachers are more afraid of the students, and in
more cases that need be teachers have a good reason to be
afraid.

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By still kickin', June 10, 2010 at 5:18 pm Link to this comment

Here we go with more money again.  Our culture has changed in this country, from one in which education was valued and parents were active in all aspects of their kids’ school experience, to one where both parents work, or single parents try to make ends meet, or there’s drug use, or…  At some point, education will exist as it once did—those who could afford to pay, got educated.  The penniless didn’t need to know anything.

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