The entire community - business owners, civic groups, municipal workers and senior citizens - must join in the effort to change the status quo, not just the educators and caregivers.
Deion Gullet has a huge grin during Springfield Central High School's graduation ceremony in 2011. This state recently reported that the four-year graduation rate rose to 83.4 percent for the 2010-2011 school year, an increase of 1.3 percent, and that the annual dropout rate fell to 2.7 percent from 2.9 percent. That meant 500 more students stayed in school. But almost 7,900 young people didn't.By ROBERT BARDWELL
The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recently released annual dropout rate data for the 2010-11 school year. The number went down to 2.7 percent, from 2.9 percent in 2008-09.
This figure represents 7,894 students who left school out of 289,161 students enrolled in Massachusetts during the year. In addition, the four-year graduation rate rose to 83.4 percent, an increase of 1.3 percent from 2010, which means more students are graduating from high school on time.
So what?
Well, the good news is that the improved dropout rate represents about 500 more students staying in school this year than in 2009, and those 500 students will likely have a better chance of success in adulthood.
Research is conclusive that students with a high-school diploma will on average earn a higher annual salary and will face lower unemployment. According to www.Postsecondary.org, in 2009, high-school graduates earned an average of $39,937 per year and 10.3 percent of them were unemployed. This compares with those with less than a high-school diploma, who earned an average of $30,958 a year and 14.9 percent of them were unemployed. Over the course of one’s lifetime, the lack of a high-school diploma means an average of more than $350,000 less income.
The bad news is that there are still almost 8,000 students in the state who are not successful in graduating from high school and will likely face economic struggles without a diploma.
Robert Bardwell is school counselor and director of guidance and student support services at Monson High School; he is a past president of the Massachusetts School Counselors Association and the New England Association for College Admission Counseling and former vice president of the American School Counselor Association.In the official press release, Gov. Deval L. Patrick was quoted as saying he “won’t be satisfied until we have a system that closes the achievement gap and prepares all of our students for success.” While this is good to hear, it begs the question, “What is the state doing to impact this trend?”
Unfortunately, Springfield’s statistics did not mirror statewide improvement - its four-year graduation rate was 52.1 percent, down from 53 percent the year before, and the dropout rate was 11.7 percent, up from 10.5 percent in 2010. Superintendent Alan Ingram responded recently that despite “night school, summer school, online credit recovery, alternative school settings, use of graduation coaches, transition mentoring for freshmen, improved teaching and learning and several academic intervention programs and monitoring for the most ‘at-risk’ students, the district is still struggling with improving its rates.”
The solution to the four-year graduation and drop-out trends requires a threefold approach: providing alternatives to traditional high school offerings, additional funding resources and a culture and attitude shift, especially in communities with high numbers of dropouts.
The most significant factor that influences the number of students who drop out is the attitude and culture within a community. In other words, are students allowed to drop out? One simply has to ask why in districts like Wayland and Wellesley, affluent Boston suburbs, were there no dropouts last year, and closer to home, districts like Longmeadow (0.5 percent), Lenox (0.4 percent) and Hadley (1 percent) had so few as compared to Springfield (11.7 percent), Holyoke (9.8 percent) and Chicopee (5.4 percent).
The difference is that in places with few dropouts, community and family expectations simply do not support, encourage or allow students to leave school without a high-school diploma, and there are numerous supports in place to keep a student in school.
In addition to a culture shift, the entire community - business owners, civic groups, municipal workers and senior citizens - must join in the effort to change the status quo, not just the educators and caregivers. The saying that it takes a village to raise a child could not be more true if we are going to reverse this trend.
Further complicating this issue is that there is not an impetus to create such a change - there are no demonstrations, rallies or demands to reverse the trend. There have always been dropouts and will continue to be dropouts, so why do we need a change now, some may say. Unfortunately, this logic means more of the same.
The dropout problem in our urban areas is not going away anytime soon. The best we can hope for is that with enough support and encouragement and the community taking on this challenge, that families can get help early in a child’s education to provide the basic needs and resources to overcome the potential barriers to high school success they may encounter down the road.
To do anything less means that we continue to have thousands of high school students doomed to be walking the streets without a high school diploma and not reaching their fullest potential. Where are the superheroes when we need them?