State House leaders held their first public hearing this week about the shocking high school graduation rate in the state. Almost one out of every three kids who begins the 9th grade doesn’t earn a high school diploma four years later. Roughly half of African-American males don’t graduate.
State officials used to avoid talking about those numbers, calculating the graduation rates in different ways that understated the enormity of the problem. Now that they are being honest about the figures, top elected officials are finally talking seriously about addressing them.
The overall figures are troubling enough. The numbers for African-Americans are shameful and along with the woeful state of the mental health system, represent the biggest scandal in North Carolina. We are literally failing half of a generation of Black males and then surprised by the disparities and problems that follow that failure.
House Speaker Joe Hackney convened the public hearing to figure out what to do about it and heard a lot of ideas, more funding for programs like Communities in Schools that connects local leaders and struggling students. Communities in Schools is making a difference and ought to be available in every county in the state.
Other folks talked about more targeted programs for at-risk kids, more funding for early intervention programs, more help for good teachers to keep them in the classroom. All good ideas too.
The public hearing comes the same week that Kaiser Family Foundation updated its database about disparities in states between races on key indicators of health and economic well-being.
The news is not good and some of the most shocking numbers have been around a while. Slightly more than 18 percent of people in North Carolina live in poverty as measured by the federal poverty level, which is well below what most families need to get by. Just over 12 percent of white North Carolinians are poor, 33 percent of African-Americans are.
Poverty remains one of the best predictors of problems in school for children, though policymakers rarely discuss it because it would require massive new investments in child care, affordable housing, and health care.
But if one third of African-Americans in the state are living in poverty and poverty makes it far more likely that children will struggle in school, doesn’t it follow that poverty must be addressed?
The other disparities are equally as stunning. The annual HIV/AIDS case rate is 4.6 for every 100,000 white North Carolinians. It is 43.8 for African-Americans, ten times higher. Yet calls for new funding for HIV/AIDS education and prevention are almost always ignored.
Even in areas where there are much narrower disparities, the fact that so many African-Americans are poor means they don’t have the resources to cope with problems like mental illness on their own, and relying on the state mental health system isn’t much help these days.
More than 26 percent of African-American adults in the state report poor mental health, slightly more than their white counterparts. Parents struggling with mental illness are not likely to be able to provide the support that children in school need. Neither are parents who are sick and can’t afford to see a doctor or single mothers stuck in poverty because they can’t pay for child care for a younger child.
Those issues apparently didn’t come up too much at the first hearing about dropouts, but poverty is the catalyst of the tragic cycle of the achievement gap turning into the graduation gap leading to the poverty gap that fuels the achievement gap.
The same week of the hearing and the new numbers about disparities, House leaders told budget writers to find $45 million more to cut from a budget that is already shaping up as much less ambitious about addressing the human service problems as Governor Mike Easley’s inadequate proposal.
It seems that our graduation gap and poverty gap will continue as long as there remains such a disturbing reality gap in our public policy debates in Raleigh.
