The District of Columbia is a great city. It is blessed with human, political and financial resources that are the envy of other capital cities around the world. It is home to a burgeoning job market hungry for highly skilled adults. It annually ranks among the 10 smartest cities in the US and it is home to a diverse set of postsecondary options including: (1) Georgetown University, the oldest Jesuit and Catholic university in the US; (2) Howard University, the most academically diverse member of Historically Black Colleges and Universities; and (3) Gallaudet University, the world’s first advanced academic institution for deaf and blind students. The District is also a relocation hub for families, start-up companies and established international corporations.
Yet, in the midst of all this bravado, there is a silent epidemic: students who drop out of high school.
Twenty20.
The phenomenon of students leaving high school without a diploma or G.E.D. is not new in America. Nor are the risks factors that predict how likely a student is to drop out: below-level reading rates, high truancy rates and poor grades. Socio-economic factors, home environment and community matter, too.
Still, there have been several success stories and D.C. proudly boasts about its poster students every day — the ones who beat the odds and are now active participants in our knowledge economy. Thanks to decades of reform initiatives in the District of Columbia Public School System (D.C.P.S.) that date back to the Arlene Ackerman administration, the needle is moving in the right direction, with D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson leading the newest wave of improvements.
Still, we face a bitter tale of dropouts in the nation’s capital. According to data from the D.C. Office of the Superintendent of Education, 58% of the students who enrolled in a D.C. high school in fall 2010 graduated in spring 2014.
Admittedly, this is an improvement from previous years. But what happened to the other 42%? Some students remained enrolled in D.C.P.S. for an additional year or two, while some completed school in another educational setting, some moved to another city, and others quietly dropped out. Whatever the reason, 42% of our freshmen in 2010 were not included in an adjusted four-year cohort graduation rate. This is a national shame.
Dropping out of high school can have a domino effect devastating and difficult to reverse when unaddressed. Unemployment is a good example. According to the federal Bureau of Statistics, an individual 25 or older with less than a high school diploma had an unemployment rate of 9% in 2014, when the national unemployment rate was 5%. In 2014, a person with a bachelor’s degree earned $1,101 a week, whereas a person without a high school diploma received $488 a week.
The bottom-line? Economic metrics prove that completing high school is absolutely critical for success later in life. When we see below 50% high school graduation rates in predominantly black schools east of the Anacostia River—such as Ballou and Anacostia—we begin to understand the continuing despair and poverty in areas like Wards 7 and 8.
So, where do we go from here? We need a model to articulate a hopeful message to the students who left. This should include successful, multi-state models like Pathways in Education that exclusively focus on saving students who have dropped out, or are at risk of dropping out, by employing non-traditional teaching and learning methods that get results. This is particularly salient for a city with a large population of low-income black and Hispanic students, special needs students, gifted students and English language learners.
Fortunately, D.C. has several options already in place: new philanthropic-driven initiatives targeted to these populations, existing alternative schools within and outside of D.C.P.S., public charter schools and a private voucher school program. These existing options, however, cannot scale up quickly enough to address our pressing dropout problem. Even if they could, these models tend to focus on students who stayed.
Dropping out of school is a process. It never occurs overnight. If we continue to ignore it, the damage could be much more permanent and drastic than we can imagine.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1UdybiG
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment