The most underreported story in North Carolina is the state’s shameful high school dropout rate. Policymakers don’t want to talk about it. Many education officials would rather hide it. The media is not all that excited about reporting it. Meanwhile a third of a generation is headed toward a life of struggle because they are not receiving a high school diploma.
That was all clear again Tuesday with the publication of a new report by Education Week Magazine funded by the Gates Foundation, a report largely ignored by the state’s media. The report shows that North Carolina’s high graduation rate is 66 percent. For African-American males, it is 49 percent. For Hispanic males, 47 percent.
Those are figures that ought to be a state scandal that prompts emergency action, but they are not figures that you hear very often. That’s not an accident. The Education Week study also describes how states misreport their graduation rates, citing North Carolina as an example.
State education officials reported a graduation rate of 97 percent for the 2002-2003 school year, when the actual rate was 66 percent. The state calculates the rate as the percentage of students who graduate who get their high school diploma in four years, so students who leave school are not counted at all.
The study calculated the rate based on the percentage of students entering the 9th grade who graduate four years later, adjusting for students who move or transfer. State officials have agreed to determine graduation and dropout rates that way beginning in 2007, but that didn’t stop the state from issuing a news release in March claiming that the high school dropout rate had fallen to 4.7 percent, a fact that is simply not true.
There is widespread agreement about the consequences of dropping out of high school. Dropouts earn far less, are more likely to end up in prison, and face far more health problems than high school graduates.
The cost to society is enormous. The Education Week report says that a one percent increase in the graduation rate of men from ages 20 to 60 would save the country as much as $1.4 billion a year in reduced costs from crime. An earlier study found that North Carolina will lose more than $10 billion a result of the more than 40,000 students who dropped out in 2004.
Yet the dropout crisis continues and most state leaders seem to be looking the other way. So too is much of the state’s media. The Charlotte Observer reported on the study, but that was about it for coverage.
That’s not only disturbing, but surprising, since the report included a separate profile of each state that includes loads of interesting data. The graduation for Charlotte-Mecklenburg was 56 percent. In Wake County, it was 82 percent, the second best among the nation’s 50 biggest school districts.
Overall, the message is clear, even if policymakers don’t want to hear it. The state is failing a third of the students who enter the ninth grade, half the children of color, and misleading us all about the extent of the problem.
The report ought to be on every legislators’ desk and in the middle of table when House and Senate budget negotiators are trying to decide which of three key education initiatives for poor schools to fund.
They need to fund to them all. Then they need to get together with state education officials and tell us what else they are going to do about the dropout scandal that threatens our future.
