Too many of our students are dropping out, from late middle-school grades and especially in high school. For a variety of reasons, ranging from peer pressure to boredom or failure in the classroom to family circumstances that call on them to assume adult roles way too early, students are quitting school and, too often, hitting the streets.
If we needed yet another reminder of why that is a terrible state of affairs, consider a study from Northwestern University.
Here are the key conclusions of that study, as reported last week in The New York Times:
"On any given day, about one in every 10 young male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention, compared with one in 35 young male high school graduates."
The Times went on to explain this evidence, which might be especially resonant in this community where the achievement gap between minority and majority students has been especially embarrassing.
"The picture is even bleaker for African Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day the study said," according to the Times report.
If ever there were a greater endorsement of programs to help counter high-school dropouts, we haven't seen it.
Durham Public Schools, with great assistance from the Durham County Board of Commissioners and community groups, is working hard to curb our egregious rate of school dropouts.
Maybe a generation ago, school dropouts could find sustainable employment on an assembly line or elsewhere in the manufacturing economy.
But no longer.
As the Northwestern study makes clear, we have a couple of choices.
We can continue to tolerate a high late of leakage, in which thousands of students who start school in kindergarten have exited by commencement day. They can head for the streets as drop-out or push-outs.
Or we can take up the challenge of keeping those kids in school until graduation, no mater what the hurdles their background and home life present.
Or, we can spend way more in the years ahead to keep them in prison.
Is that a hard choice?
