We Can Identify Likely Dropouts and Ensure They Stay in School to Graduate
Robert Balfanz, who directs the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University,reported in Saturday’s NY Times that “half of the African-American boys who veer off the path to high school graduation do so in just 660 of more than 12,600 regular and vocational high schools” across the United States. “These 660 schools are typically big high schools that teach only poor kids of color. They are concentrated in 15 states. Many are in major cities, but others are in smaller, decaying industrial cities or in the South, especially in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.”
“This seemingly intractable problem is a national tragedy,” writes Balfanz, “but there is a solution.” The research of Balfanz and his colleagues over the years has identified and documented the problem, and in Stop Holding Us Back he recommends steps society can take to improve significantly the high school graduation rate of African American and Hispanic young men growing up in deep poverty.
Balfanz explains that in each of the schools serving the most vulnerable young men, there are between 50 and 100 youths who demonstrate a need for much greater support. African American and Latino young men are at highest risk between the ages of 11 to 21, at a time when all the institutions that could help them weaken services: “At the very moment they are the most developmentally vulnerable, the response from schools, foster care, the health system and child protective services gets weaker, while the response from the justice system is harsher.”
The most vulnerable young men miss weeks or months of school. Many are suspended repeatedly. By ninth grade almost all are above age for their grade, many need special education, many have work or family responsibilities, and many are chronically absent. They are likely to fail their classes, repeat ninth grade, and subsequently drop out. “This is a highly predictable, almost mechanical course, which is why we call those schools dropout factories.” “These young men are waving their hands early and often to say they need help, but our We Can Identify Likely Dropouts and Ensure They Stay in School to Graduate | janresseger: