I went in search of graduation rates for my high school class (2001) in upstate New York. I haven’t found those stats, but what I *have* found boils my blood.
The immediate Google results I got were a slew of local news outlets touting improved graduation rates over the past decade. The numbers that these articles cite are averages of school districts that are geographically close but culturally very far apart. I don’t claim that this is unique to where I grew up. I’m sure it’s the story across the country.
http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2010/03/10/capital-region-high-school-graduation-rates-2009
The first chart in this post may look like a bunch of random school districts to you, but I know the places. There is a gradient - wealthier suburbs and rural towns at the top, moving toward poorer rural areas and then finally cities at the bottom. In 2009, the district I grew up in - Albany - had a 53% graduation rate. Barely half of the students graduated. But, as so many articles written as a result of the State releasing those numbers report, graduation rates are up! Well, for the kids that matter, anyway. The kids in the cities, most of whom are poor and not white, are a lost cause anyway, right? Let’s focus on the numbers from the white suburbs that tell a nicer story.
The saddest fact of all is that these kids potentially have a better opportunities to prepare themselves for life outside of chaotic classrooms with teachers who are burnt out and have given up. I hope that many of the dropouts were able to go on to start working immediately, gaining experience worth far more than the best case in-school scenario - a mediocre education of memorizing facts to pass standardized tests - would give them. Of course, the reality for most isn’t so straightforward, and it’s looking more bleak all of the time, but I can hope. At least those kids weren’t around for the after school knife fights?
If I ever become a parent, I dread the day that I have to make the decision about where my child goes to school. It’s completely out of the question for me to send my child to a private school, or to move to some white suburb for a marginally better public school. At the same time, it’s out of the question for me to subject them to the at best useless, at worst dangerous, public schools in an urban area.
I have my typical high level, hand-waving prescription for finding a way to improve this dreadful situation, but that seems useless when it looks like so few care about these invisible kids. What wasted opportunity.
