Nearly half of the Latino and African American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education, according to a Harvard University report released Wednesday.
The report concluded that the public remains largely unaware of the true extent of the problem because the state uses “misleading and inaccurate” methods to report dropout and graduation rates.
Shouldn’t someone be fired over this?
The troubling graduation rates are most alarming in minority communities, where students are more likely to attend what researchers call “dropout factories.”
These would be substandard schools with no supplies while somehow schools in wealthier anglo areas have lots of supplies and equipment..
“Whether or not students graduate is the most important thing that happens to them in school,” said Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project. “If students don’t make it through high school, they really have no chance in our economy.”
Not entirely. Graduation is not the important thing, being able to read and write is. A friend who teaches junior math at Beverly Hill High says he routinely gets students who will fail because they can’t read well enough to understand the textbook -and that these are native born, English as a first language students.
The problems here are huge and systemic, reaching into the society at large.