The Huffington Post recently reported that cash-strapped states are having trouble enacting President Obama’s call to raise the high school dropout age to eighteen. Despite political will for the initiative, its high cost has made it a non-starter in legislatures across the country.
Reuters–US
This lack of action is hardly surprising from states and municipalities that are still struggling economically, despite the fact that dozens of studies have shown that kids who dropout are at much higher risk of incarceration, teen pregnancy, and drug use. Yet it strikes me that whatever financial hit raising the dropout age to 18 would have on state coffers, it surely pales in comparison to the $320 billion of economic potential that is lost each year as a result of students dropping out.
So why the short-sightedness?
My suspicion is that another factor is at work—a viewpoint recently articulated by Illinois State Senator David Luechtefeld. When he was asked about a rejected bill to raise the drop out age, Luechtefeld responded, “A kid who doesn’t want to be in school is a problem for the kids who want to be there.”
The senator unwittingly conjured up a familiar bogeyman in our American psyche: would-be dropouts as uninspired troublemakers, intent on not only disrupting their own education, but that of their peers.
The uncomfortable truth is that far too often that “problem child” in our heads is an urban youth with black or brown skin.
I’d love introduce all those who think our schools are better off without kids who are inclined to drop out to my former student, let’s call him TJ. A month before President Obama’s State of the Union, where he called a reduction in dropout rates a national priority, TJ sent me an email with the subject line: “I need help.” It was the first time I had heard from him in four years.
When I taught TJ in the 8th grade, he was a student of limitless potential—an incredible writer, a caring soul, a natural leader. But he had his share of troubles as well. Both of his parents had passed away when he was in elementary school, so his living situation was far from stable as he bounced around from one family member to another.
In the years since I had seen him, TJ entered a high school where he found the coursework dull, and where his interest in biology was not nurtured. So on his sixteenth birthday, he simply stopped showing up. And three years later, working at a fast food chain on the corner near his former high school, he regretted it. He wanted to be back in school. He wanted to make something of himself.
Now, TJ is going to be fine—mostly due to New York’s innovative District 79, a city agency that provides alternative education. I phoned a few friends I had from the Teach For America corps, we got TJ signed up, and he’s back in school. In fact, he received an A on his last biology project. But for every TJ who is back in the classroom, many more wind up unemployed, under-employed, or incarcerated.
TJ teaches us something. When we identify children as problems, we admit not to their failure but our own. Our failure as a nation to see their potential. Our failure to understand and address the personal circumstances and systemic obstacles that lead them to the point where they drop out. And our failure to use imagination and innovation to keep more kids in school so they can realize their potential—for themselves and for our communities.
In pursuit of that essential goal, I urge us all to not drop out so easily.
