The straight scoop regarding public high school dropouts

Aimee Levitt has written a terrific article on the high dropout rate among public high school students, using the local St. Louis school district to illustrate a national problem. Her article, which appears in the St. Louis Riverfront Times, is entitled "Class Conscious: St. Louis educators are desperately seeking ways to get kids back in school." Consider the following:

  • In the United States, one student drops out of high school every 9 seconds.
  • On average, dropouts earn $10,000 less per year than workers with high school diplomas.
  • Dropouts are much more likely to be unemployed, recipients of government assistance, imprisoned or suffering from poor health.
Here in St. Louis, 22% of the public high school students drop out every year. This means that half of the students who started ninth grade this year will have dropped out by the time their class graduates. Levitt's well-written article documents the scope and depth of the problem. She also profiles many of the people working hard for the children. One of these people is Terry Houston, of Roosevelt high school. Two years ago, when he became principal, there were "38 known gangs in the building" and "attendance was less than 60%." That is the extent of the problem, a problem that Houston has had some success in addressing, according to Levitt. A wide-ranging solution will require the work of numerous people, of course, including people who run GED programs, education reformers from City Hall, case managers for social services, educators to run alternative programs for children who have already dropped out, and, of course, the parents of the students, many of whom are maintaining lifestyles that all-but-guarantee that their children will fall into similar dyfunctional lifestyles. Levitt's story is detailed and disturbing, but it also offers us some reasons to think that we can actually do better than we have been doing. After all, real human lives are at stake when we allow children to drop out of school. If that is not reason to use Herculean effort to change the system, what is?

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States don’t have to wait for stimulus payments

What with the Congress mulling over plans for stimulating the American economy, there is an even more critical role to be played by the states in delivering aid to those hardest hit by our current economic crisis. States are where the tires hit the road, and states can act much more efficiently and quickly to meet the specific demands of their citizens. Even after the states have taken action, Congress can support these actions with direct funding and augment the strained budgets the states face with declining tax revenues in our recessionary economy. I’ll use an example from Missouri. We have just elected a Democratic Governor after four years of a GOP Governor who spent his time giving tax breaks and favors to corporations and contributors and left the State of Missouri with a budget shortfall of over $300 million. We have a GOP lead legislature in both chambers of our bicameral legislature. So far, everyone has promised “bi-partisanship” and all are looking at ways to make up the differences in funding because Missouri, like all states, has to have a balanced budget. Regardless of responsibility for why revenues are down, the Governor apparently will have to cut the budget in the current fiscal year to make ends meet. I say apparently because of that pesky requirement we balance or budget each and every year. So how does a state government fully fund priorities when immediate cash revenues keep that from being done? Here’s how . . .

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Go Ahead…Make My Day…Again…Again…

It’s like Clint Eastwood has come to town and all the bad guys are hiding under the tables or in closets. President Obama is striking down one stupid rule after another his predecessor left behind. It’s a martial arts level kung fu pen-fest, signing (or consigning) the detritus of ignorance from the last eight years into the dustbin of… Well, he's overturned the international gag rule concerning abortion information. He’s undoing the restrictions on stem cell research. He has ordered Gitmo shut down within a year and a panel to look into what to do with the detainees. Before the vacillations of moral outrage erupt over the gag rule overturn, it should be considered how absurd and cowardly a ban on talking about something actually is. And I don’t mean from a national security perspective. Clearly, some information is sensitive in that sense and should not be publicly disseminated. But in the case of the gag rule, we’re talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, Public Knowledge. If you know what to look for, anyone can find this information and not be arrested for having it. Yet grown men and women have been constrained from talking about it in the performance of their duties as doctors and nurses. What part of “choice” do the enemies of choice not understand?

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Keep NASA independent of the U.S. Military

One of the “trial balloons” of the incoming Obama administration is a proposed consolidation of NASA with US military programs for space. The ostensible reason is “national security,” but insecurity about our military’s capabilities to keep up with Chinese efforts to explore and exploit space are at the core of…

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Would you like to go to college for free?

Would you like to get smart cheaply?   You can now "attend: selected courses at prestigious college courses for free, while sitting at your computer.    The participating universities include MIT, Yale, McGill and UC-Berkeley.  This is a great opportunity if you'd like to get serious about the topics of the selected…

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