Fitzsimon File

If there is a consensus about anything in this year's heated political debate in North Carolina, it is that one of the state's most pressing problems is the scandalously low high school graduation rate, with only two-thirds of students who enter the ninth grade earning a high school diploma four years later.

A new report this week from The Schott Foundation for Public Education focuses attention on the most shocking aspect of the dropout epidemic with a look at the graduation rate of African American males in states with significant minority populations.

The report finds that just under half of Black teenage males in the ninth grade in North Carolina graduate in four years, a statistic that at first reading seems like it must be a mistake, but one that is in line with numbers furnished by state education officials.

Amazingly, the Schott Foundation reports says that North Carolina is doing slightly better than the national average in terms of Black male graduation rates, though that's no comfort when you consider that half of an entire generation of African-American males face enormous struggles in life because they don't have a high school education.

After years of brushing aside the problem and using a flawed formula to calculate the graduation rate, state officials have finally come to grips with how bad things are in parts of North Carolina and how many lives are being devastated.

The budget passed by the General Assembly this summer includes $15 million for dropout prevention grants for local schools, an initiative pushed by House leaders, particularly Speaker Joe Hackney.

Republicans have questioned the wisdom of the small grants. The market fundamentalist think tanks have ridiculed them, though many of the grants seem worthwhile and it is far too early to evaluate their effectiveness.

Lawmakers were less willing to invest in other ways to tackle the high school graduation problem, like adequately funding a program that has a proven track record of success or finally making a concerted effort to reduce poverty, still a powerful predictor of success in school.

Leaders of Communities in Schools were scheduled to make a presentation to the State Board of Education this week about a recent independent evaluation of its dropout prevention efforts and the findings are impressive.

Ninety-seven percent of the more than four thousand students identified as potential dropouts in 2006-2007 stayed in school and 88 percent of the students tracked for attendance problems improved their attendance.

But Communities in Schools only operates in roughly half the counties in North Carolina and lawmakers included only $500,000 in the budget for the group, far short of what's needed to expand services to rest of the state.

The General Assembly also declined to fund 100 graduation coaches for high schools and middle schools with high percentages of at-risk kids. The coaches' only duty is to spend every day working with kids who are struggling at school. It's an approach based on a similar program in Georgia.

The latest graduation report comes on the heels of other studies that identify poverty as a key predictor of how well a student does in school and how likely he or she is to dropout. 

Overall, North Carolina ranked 38^th in country in graduation rates in 2006, ahead of many other Southern states like South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia. North Carolina students were 19^th best in math scores, 33^rd in reading.

All but one of the states that scored higher on math tests have a lower percentage of children living in poverty than North Carolina, all but two of the states that did better on reading do.  The same trend exists when considering the percentage of children eligible for free and reduced lunch.

A May report from the American Association of University Women found that family income is more closely associated with high student performance than gender, challenging the assumptions that single sex schools will improve student success.

Many of the assumptions about improving schools and helping students have missed the point. Linda Harrill with Communities in Schools says when a student drops out of school, it isn't a failure, it is the culmination of failure.

Dropout grants are a decent start toward turning that around, but not nearly enough. Lawmakers need to significantly increase support for programs that work and get serious about helping poor families lift themselves out of poverty with new investments in affordable housing, child care, and health coverage.

Nobody wins when half of a generation of kids doesn't make it to the end of the 12^th grade.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.