Drop-Out Rates

I was reading this article this morning, they complaining about the drop-out rate in Louisiana.

Lemme tell you one damned thing. I work in a high school, a fine high school with great accolades, listed as one of the top 500 high schools in the US. We routinely have students that excel on the ACT tests and we routinely have a goodly percentage of our students go to college with academic scholarships. We're not an athletic bunch, but we've got some scary-smart kids. Because we're located in a lower-economic zone (read: lots of low-income folks nearby), we also try to educate people who would rather hang out on the street corners, listen to hip-hop music, wear their pants sagging, and come to school only for the socialization and the subsidized lunches.

However, during the school grading period we just went through, the school got a "D" on it's report card purely for the dropouts. There is simply no way some of these kids are going to make it, and the school is penalized for it. If I get a freshman entering the 9th grade at age 16, he's got no chance in hell of graduating. His educational experience has already been set. If, by some miracle, he buckles down and studies, he won't get out of high school until age 20. What's the chances of that? Slim and none. Yeah, some of them make it, but they're the exception that proves the rule. The vast majority of those kids simply wake up one morning at age 18 and decide that they've outgrown high school. They become a dropout and they count against the school, regardless of all the efforts of the teaches and the staff.

If the parents don't care about school, the kids won't care about school. If the kids don't care, there's not a damned thing that an educator can do to motivate them. The best thing that the school can do is to identify those students early and get them out of there, before they taint other younger students in the facility.

As a school-house cop, I spend most of my time dealing with kids that don't want to be in school, don't have the skill-sets to complete the academics, yet are forced into the schools by the law. All those kids do is disrupt the high school experience for the rest of the student body. We're better off without them and it's a crying shame that those students count against the school averages.

So, for all you do-gooder educators out there, let me explain something to you. If a kid comes to school and wants to simply pass, graduate and move on, fine. He's got to have certain skills before he gets there. If you send that kid to us without that skill set, we don't have the time to bring him to speed. He's going to be a dropout, plain and simple and all the remediation in the world isn't going to change it. He's simply going to fall further and further behind and become a burden on us all. Better we recognize that early and shuffle him off to trade school or prison. That's where he's going to land eventually.