Fwd: [FWD: High school drop-out rate in major US cities at nearly 50 percent]

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

  From: brt@brucetaub.net

  Date: Thu Apr 3, 2008 4:59:18 AM US/Pacific

  To: Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>

  Subject: [FWD: High school drop-out rate in major US cities at nearly 50
  percent]

  High school drop-out rate in major US cities at nearly 50 percent

  By Barry Grey

  World Socialist Web Site     3 April 2008

  A report released Tuesday by an educational advocacy group founded by retired
  general and former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell finds
  that almost half of all public high school students in the US’ fifty largest
  cities fail to graduate.

  The report states that only 52 percent of public high school students in
  these cities graduate after four years, while the national average is 70
  percent. Some 1.2 million public high school students drop out every year,
  according to researchers.

  The report finds that, overall, 17 of the public school systems in 50 major
  cities have graduation rates of 50 percent or lower, and the average
  graduation rate of all 50 systems is 58 percent. The findings are based on
  federal Department of Education statistics for the 2003-2004 school year.

  The study, sponsored by America’s Promise Alliance and prepared by the
  Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, also shows a staggering
  difference between the drop-out rates in major urban school districts and
  those in adjoining and more affluent suburban districts. Overall, high school
  graduation rates are 15 percentage points lower in urban schools as compared
  to those in the suburbs. In twelve cities, the disparities exceed 25
  percentage points.

  In some cases, the gap between the cities, with their large concentrations of
  working class and poor residents, and the suburbs is even greater. The widest
  discrepancies cited in the report are in Baltimore, Maryland, where only 34.6
  percent of public high school students graduate, and its suburbs, where 81.5
  percent acquire diplomas after four years, and in Columbus, Ohio, with a
  graduation rate of 40.9 percent as compared to 82.9 percent in the suburbs.

  The city-suburb split is also immense in such metropolitan centers as New
  York (47.4 percent vs. 82.9 percent), Cleveland (42.2 percent vs. 78.1
  percent), Philadelphia (49.2 percent vs. 82.4 percent), Chicago (55.7 percent
  vs. 84.1 percent), Los Angeles (57.1 percent vs. 77.9 percent), and Atlanta
  (46.1 percent vs. 61.8 percent).

  A separate chart showing the graduation rates for the principal school
  districts in the 50 largest US cities points to the virtual collapse of
  public education in major urban centers.

  Detroit, by many calculations the poorest US city, graduates less than 25
  percent (24.9 percent) of its public high school students. Indianapolis
  Public Schools graduate 30.5 percent of their students, and the figures for
  the Cleveland Municipal City School District and the Baltimore City Public
  School System are 34.1 percent and 34.6 percent respectively.

  Powell founded America’s Promise Alliance, which is chaired by his wife,
  Alma, and is described as a joint effort of nonprofit groups, corporations,
  charities, community leaders, faith-based organizations and individuals. The
  former Secretary of State said of the study, “When more than 1 million
  students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a
  catastrophe.”

  The concluding section of the document released by the Editorial Projects in
  Education Research Center, which publishes Education Week, addresses the
  central issue of social inequality that is reflected in the drop-out
  statistics. “If three out of every 10 students in the nation failing to
  graduate is a reason for concern,” it states, “then the fact that just half
  of those educated in America’s largest cities are finishing high school truly
  raises cause for alarm. And the much higher rates of high school completion
  among their suburban counterparts—who may literally live and attend school
  right around the corner—place in particularly harsh and unflattering light
  the deep undercurrents of inequality that plague American public education.”

  Rick Dalton, president of College for Every Student, a Vermont group that
  helps low-income students prepare for college, said the urban-suburban
  divergence “just speaks to the crisis in the US. It is about income. Family
  income drives it all.”

  The study also notes that drop-out rates are substantially higher for blacks
  and other minorities. It states: “The gaps between whites and historically
  disadvantaged minority groups can reach as high as 25 percentage point
  nationally.”

  One measure of the social implications of the decay of the public school
  system was noted by researchers, who said people failing to graduate from
  high school were eight times more likely to end up in prison.

  Of the twelve cities where the graduation gap between urban and suburban
  schools exceeds 25 percentage points, nine are in the Northeast and Midwest.
  This is the so-called “rust belt,” where three decades of plant closures in
  such key industries as auto and steel have had the most devastating impact.
  In cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and
  Detroit, millions of decent-paying jobs have been wiped out, workers’ wages
  and living standards have been driven down, and the basic social
  infrastructure of entire communities has been gutted.

  This process, carried out under Democratic as well as Republican
  administrations on the national, state and local level, has had its
  counterpart in tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of big business, cuts
  in social services and a concentrated assault on public education for the
  working class. By such means, a massive redistribution of wealth from the
  bottom to the top has been effected, with the economy and government policy
  increasingly concentrated on generating ever greater income for a fabulously
  wealthy elite on the basis of speculation on the stock market and other
  parasitic forms of financial manipulation, including no small amount of
  outright swindling.

  The Bush administration’s so-called “No Child Left Behind” educational
  policy, enacted with the support of congressional Democrats, has marked an
  intensification of the assault on public education for the majority of the
  population. The program, which sets performance benchmarks for public
  schools, entails punitive measures, up to and including the shutdown of
  schools that fail to “perform.” It has gone hand in hand with government
  subsidies of various kinds for private schools and the encouragement of
  “charter schools” and for-profit schools that drain resources from urban
  public school districts.

  The inevitable—and intended—result is a more and more openly class-based
  education system, in which working-class youth receive substandard schooling.

  The response of the Bush administration to the America’s Promise Alliance
  report was to call for a more standardized means of tracking drop-out rates,
  within the framework of “No Child Left Behind.”

  The vast chasm between city and suburban schools is but one expression of a
  society increasingly polarized between a wealthy elite and the rest of the
  population. Recent studies by Edward N. Wolff of the Levy Economics Institute
  of Bard College reveal that the top 1 percent of the US population holds 34.3
  percent of the net worth of American households. The richest 10 percent of
  the population holds nearly 71 percent of the national household wealth. The
  bottom 80 percent of American households accounts for just 15.3 percent of
  wealth. The bottom 40 percent of households possesses just 0.2 percent of
  wealth.

  It is this last segment of the population that largely comprises the
  populations of cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Indianapolis where high
  school drop-out rates range from 65 percent to 75 percent.

  These statistics reveal the nightmarish reality behind the “American Dream”
  and similar clichés beloved of the media and the political establishment. The
  destruction of education for millions of working class youth gives the lie to
  the democratic pretensions of the American ruling elite.

  None of the major presidential candidates and neither of the two big business
  parties can address the virtual collapse of public education revealed in the
  report issued on Tuesday. It starkly exposes the socially destructive and
  irrational workings of the capitalist system, which is defended by the
  Democrats and Republicans, and which has as its fundamental social principle
  not the common good, but the enrichment of a wealthy elite at the expense of
  the vast majority of the people.

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