Curing the dropout disease

Positive trends in education tend to mislead society into thinking everything is fine. Improving graduation rates and declining instances of crime produce a misconception which media outlets exacerbate that “American education is strong.” To a certain extent, sure, statistical gains are undeniable. Relative to population, fewer students abandon their education today than ever before. Additionally, Black and Hispanic teens are receiving their high school diplomas and deciding to pursue four-year degrees at rigorous collegiate institutions. Despite these certainties, students born into the United States compete poorly against foreign equivalents. English comprehension and math scores hover around the global average. Even bipartisan pieces of legislation such as No Child Left Behind prove to produce decrease learning outcomes. Teachers feel less secure in their line of work, students experience over-testing and excessive homework as a result of that punitive law. These unintended consequences indicate that states and families understand community needs better than Washington politicians. Ultimately, to cure this dropout disease, education must become more equitable for our students. In this paper, I recommend policies that could accomplish this ambitious goal nationally and locally, as well as diagnose why boys and girls discontinue their school subscriptions. Student surveys show that poor grades and bad behavior push males to drop out, while compelling outside interests such as marriage and parenting pull away females before they obtain their diploma.

Prior to analyzing some academic journals and peer-reviewed books which elucidate gendered aspects, I will examine sociological dimensions of this public issue. To effectively grasp the depths of this problem, I will be citing throughout my essay “status dropout rates” (hereafter SDR), a metric employed by the National Center for Education Statistics which represents the percentage of non-institutionalized 16- through 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in school and lack a diploma or general education credential. As my classmates and I summarized last week, “dropping out of high school causes disadvantages which limit economic and social well-being throughout adult life.”

With this said, first we should understand why American society privileges graduates and indirectly punishes dropouts. Simply, capitalism produces this trend. As Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore (1945) famously explored with regard to stratification, jobs which demand niche skills such as doctoral work “naturally command great prestige, high salary, ample leisure, and the like” (244). In other words, disciplines where quality personnel come in narrow supply reward people with perks. Especially today, as more people complete high school than ever before, if you want to earn a stable living, dropping out is basically career suicide; dropouts contribute less to the domestic economy than they cost, and over their lifetime, accumulate a fractional amount of wealth compared to graduate equivalents.

In their 1976 book, Schooling in Capitalist America, conflict theorists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis documented what contemporary scholars call the “opportunity gap.” American education is fundamentally unequal, they concluded, because family socioeconomic background positively correlates with educational attainment. In less abstract terms, children from poor urban communities quite consistently experience a worse standard of schooling than wealthy suburbanites. Last month, two Brookings economists, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, released a paper on economic inequality and the dropout dilemma. A state-by-state comparison of income disparities reveals that poor youth from high inequality areas like the District of Columbia develop “economic despair,” a belief that they are unable to advance into middle class status (2). As a result, they are exponentially more inclined to drop out.

Next, we should consider the racial breakdown of SDR statistics as tabulated by NCES last year. As stated previously and depicted graphically due right, Blacks and Non-white Hispanics drop out more often than Whites, despite stable numeric reductions since the sixties. Citizens of an Asian background consistently outlast and outperform other minority groups. Also notable in this discussion is an oft-repeated Department of Justice study conducted by statistician Catherine Wolf Harlow. After personally interviewing inmates and those on probation, Harlow tallied their responses to a variety of questions. Through this process, she determined that 75 percent of state prisoners and 6 of every 10 federal prisoners failed to earn a high school diploma (2003).

“Hidden curriculum,” a popular topic in contemporary sociology, might explain why criminals tend to be dropouts, and reversely, why dropouts turn to crime. John Dewey, a progressive education theorist, illustrated in Democracy and Education that besides traditional instruction of reading, writing and arithmetic, moral development happens inside classrooms. After households, schools are arguably next most important among sites where socialization occurs. Through education, adolescents and teenagers become aware of what values their society prioritizes in people, such as patriotism, morality and rule of law. Kids also develop a recognition of both hard and soft rules, laws they should never cross versus those that enforcement agents commonly overlook, respective examples of which might be committing a robbery and ignoring a crosswalk. Immediately after suspending their student status, young people confront barriers; without problem-solving skills and a developed character, any challenge could drive someone into delinquent patterns.

At this point, before distinguishing addressing some gendered aspects, I want to focus my analysis on the prevalence of dropping out inside Washington, DC. Every sociological dimension previously discussed - racial demographics, financial comparisons, prevalence of crime - factor into why such a considerable distinction exists. District of Columbia Public School graduation rates “surged” in 2015 to 64 percent, reported Michael Alison Chandler and Moriah Balingit of The Washington Post, with systemwide gains of seven points and two points for African Americans and Hispanics respectively. While improvements are universally good, that number still rests well beneath the national average of 81 percent. Frankly, we should remain unimpressed. According to NCES 4-year adjusted cohort measurements (2015), fewer students graduate in this capital territory than any official state, and by a substantial margin – Nevada posted a 70 percent rate. Close observers of the dropout epidemic are most profoundly struck by the imbalance of DC education statistics rather than quantitative perspectives.

NeighborhoodInfo DC, a project of the Urban Institute, collected data in 2012 - replicated below - that shows the percentage of District residents lacking a high school diploma by ward. Their results are staggering and illustrate why everyone except tourists divide this city into quadrants. Northwest residents wear plenty of suits and boast an impressive amount of professional degrees. Accordingly, less than 5 percent of this combined subgroup (wards 2 and 3) failed to graduate high school. People from Southeast, however, receive a relatively disproportionate quality of education. On average, 1 of every 5 people never earned their diploma. And sadly, this reflects the quality of life in this area as well. Upscale chains refuse to establish themselves because of crime; rundown housing and businesses are rampant; healthy eating options are almost nonexistent; and cases of HIV in that region, though recently improving, used to compare to third-world countries.

When approaching the dropout disease from a gendered mindset, the question is why each sex quits rather than their numerical separation. Guys undoubtedly drop out more often than girls, though by an almost insignificant difference. This stands as true today as forty years ago. 7.1 percent of males dropped out in 2014 compared to 5.9 percent of females (NCES 2014a). In 1998, the gender gap reached a notably wide point, 3 percent, due to a decline in female SDR and 1 percent uptick in male SDR.

Sociologists first compared student dropout explanations by gender in 1955, when a National Science Foundation grant allowed Educational Testing Service, a nonprofit assessment organization based in New Jersey, to conduct a nationally representative study of over 34 thousand sophomores and seniors (Doll et al.). Since then multiple peer-reviewed reports developed a frame to understand rationales: push and pull factors. Will J. Jordan, Julia Lara and James M. McPartland, in their 1994 report published by Johns Hopkins, scavenged NCES study content to advance this push/pull paradigm. In their abstract they said the following:

A significantly larger percentage of male dropouts than female dropouts cited job-related factors; females cited family-related reasons more frequently than did males. Hispanic and African American females cited family-related reasons more often than did white females. The overwhelming majority of dropouts did have plans for resuming their education, but these plans differed by race/ethnicity and gender.

Building on that efficient summary, we understand today that “women who give up on high school are nine times more likely to be, or become, young single mothers” (Lynch 2015). Females say marriage pulled them away considerably more than males do. Instead, some guys enlist in the armed forces before obtaining a certificate of completion, a motivation which few girls list as prevalent.

To begin, I would like to briefly cover some laws impacting the SDR. As part of his war on poverty, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law in 1965. A revolutionary piece of legislation, ESEA created a funding platform called Title 1 which annually allocates federal funds to low-achieving school districts. Last year, $7 billion were distributed to schools with disadvantaged students, $44 million in allocations specifically to DCPS based on NCES estimates (2014b).

Several reauthorizations later and we experience the impact of No Child Left Behind, the trademark George W. Bush education initiative blamed for creating a decade of high-stakes testing and unrealistic proficiency requirements, performance goals so outlandishly optimistic that President Obama felt compelled to waive them state-by-state to prevent drastic measures from taking effect. In a 2010 book, Diane Ravitch, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, called NCLB a “punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools” (110). NCLB felt that “lazy teachers and lazy principals” caused low scores and needed to be threatened with losing their jobs to improve. Even most basically, Ravitch fights for lawmakers to question where their notion originated that standardized test scores “are synonymous with good education” (111). In response to these widespread criticisms, this past fall Congress passed a reform of NCLB called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is built around a more reasonable supposition, that communities understand their needs better than the federal government does (Berman 2015). States are accountable to intervene in schools where less than 67 percent of students graduate and exam scores fall under the fifth percentile nationally.

Having thoroughly elaborated on the dimensions of the dropout disease and summarized major legislations impacting it, I would like to propose two policies - one macro- and one micro-level suggestion - that could further alleviate this problem. First, I suggest an increase in federal funding to low-achieving school districts. Clearly the amount of funding from Title 1 is insufficient. A glance at DCPS and other large urban education systems warrant that realization. Specifically this money should address three tasks:

1. Enhance guidance departments to provide students with better academic plans and emotional support

2. Incorporate tech in classrooms to increase student engagement

3. Teach safe sex and emphasize drug-free lifestyles to limit and deter reasons many decide to drop out

On a smaller scale, District-wide I recommend magnet and public charter schools which require applications consider personal background in their selection criteria. Many children, especially students in Southeast, are deprived of a stable home. Maybe they live in a single-parent household and must care for their siblings; maybe they are unable to study because they hear gunshots outside on a weekly basis. These constant, unavoidable barriers should not hinder naturally smart pupils from gaining admission to competitive institutions. In-boundary and feeder-pattern schools, on the other hand, ought to incentivize kids to stick around by offering after-school athletics and artistic programs. Students who commit to such endeavors are more likely to focus inside the classroom, hold a positive opinion of their friends, teachers and life prospects.

In this paper, I discussed what I would call the dropout disease, an epidemic I consider personal being a student of Washington, DC, where fewer students graduate each year than anywhere else in America. I covered some cultural, economic, racial and criminal dimensions of this problem and discussed why boys discontinue their school subscription compared with girls. In short, poor grades and bad behavior push males to drop out, while compelling outside interests such as marriage and parenting pull away females before they obtain their diploma. Then I proceeded to propose a national and local solution to address the dropout phenomenon: more federal funding to low-income schools across the country, and in DC, more open selection criteria at rigorous institutions. While the dropout problem is a disease, it has a cure. We must act swiftly and unilaterally.

#highschool #dropout #education #Washington #sociology