Education report: Students need to understand dire consequences of dropping out

Dropping out of high school is a costly mistake. Adults who never finish high school or earn an equivalency degree earn about 65 percent of that earned by high school graduates. Their job options are limited for life.

That bleak prospect, of course, never seems to deter the teenager who has decided to drop out of school for the immediate gratification of a job, money and avoiding the rigors of schoolwork along with the embarrassment of failure. Failure as an adult with family responsibilities, of course, doesn’t enter their young minds.

Schoolyards are littered with various schemes to keep kids in school against their will. Compulsory attendance laws have worked to some extent.

Before such laws, young men, in particular, often dropped out of school as early as the ninth or 10th grade and never looked back.

No one bothered to do much about it. If students had their parents’ permission to quit school, that was sufficient. Jobs in factories or on farms were abundant in the middle of the last century and schools missed neither them nor their disruptive behavior.

We know better now. In recent years, schools have adopted plans to help pregnant girls stay in school, to help disaffected youth experience alternative classroom learning or simply enable students who are determined to drop out of school to become involved in a GED program before doing so.

Novel approach

Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry is confronting the problem in his state with a novel approach. According to Education Week, Henry is proposing to put “graduation coaches” in that state’s schools. Modeled after a program in Georgia, Oklahoma’s graduation coaches will “keep students focused on academics and help them deal with issues outside school that could be a barrier to [their] graduation.”

“With this program in place,” one report said, “a graduation coach will be there to help students through difficult times and see them on to graduation.” One might ask, as I did: Isn’t this what guidance counselors do all the time? Apparently this program will identify at-risk students as early as middle school and provide more mentoring and tutoring than traditional guidance counselors have the time or training for.

Oklahoma is tackling the problem because as Shelley Hickman, a spokeswoman for the education department said, 3.2 percent of that state’s school population dropped out of school last year.

Something had to be done.

Just the same, Sandy Garrett, Oklahoma superintendent of public instruction, wrote an editorial on the subject for the Muskogee Phoenix in which he said, “I want to ask who abdicated their responsibility and let all these kids drop out of school in the first place? The first graduation coach is at home; everyone knows that, Mom and Dad. Still, many schools all across the U.S. are showing only an 80 percent graduation rate, despite constant contact between the school and the home, and near begging by school personnel for absentee students to come to school and graduate. Many schools bend over backwards to find ways, any way, to help students complete school. It’s there just for the taking.”

He asks a legitimate question and makes an excellent point. Free public education is there for the taking in this country. Why do parents not insist that their kids take advantage of it?

Parental failure

These parents’ failure to parent cost taxpayers millions every year. We pay for guidance counselors, “graduation coaches,” remedial programs galore, and a host of other efforts to keep kids in school with little or no help from some parents. Then taxpayers pay for the various community programs that provide a “safety net” for the dropouts in adult life who cannot provide for themselves or their families.

We must continue our efforts to keep kids in school, however.

Maryland is doing just that. A panel of 50 educators recommended that Maryland lawmakers raise the compulsory school attendance age from 16 to 18.

Here’s the catch. Ruma Kumar, a Baltimore Sun reporter, writes, “Requiring Maryland students to remain in school until they turn 18 could drastically reduce dropout rates but would cost the state $200 million a year and worsen the existing shortage of teachers, classroom space and other resources.”

Our free public education system becomes more costly every year as schools take on more of the responsibilities once handled by parents.

Some parents simply do not feel the same urgency to keep their kids in school as state and school officials. Unfortunately, there is no penalty if they don’t.

Charles Cummins, Ed.D., is a retired school administrator. Send questions to him at: cacummins818@gmail.com.