~ Dropping Out of School ~

A White Paper, from the Good Community Committee

INTRODUCTION

Few events have more profound consequences in the life of a child than dropping out of school and failing to graduate.  The child who drops out is, in all likelihood, forever handicapped in the world of work, in family responsibilities, and in discharging the responsibilities of citizenship.

Since its inception in 1995, the Good Community Committee has been deeply concerned about the conditions of children and youth of Springfield and Greene County.  Its examination of data regarding the young–the engagement of the young with the criminal justice system, homelessness, violence both as victims and as perpetrators, out-of-home foster care placements, births to teens, alcohol consumption, etc.--leads to the conclusion that most indicators show a worsening in the conditions of the young. 

The inquiries of the Committee have led to a focus on two issues which, if addressed with determination and persistence, hold promise of bringing improvement.  They are issues for which we can see at least dimly the strategies for engagement.  Those issues are child abuse and neglect, and dropping out of school.  This paper is a plea to the community to understand and take action to help young people who are failing to finish high school. 

THE EXTENT OF THE PROBLEM

It is not easy to know exactly how many children and youth drop out of school and fail to complete high school.  There is no uniform approach to defining what is meant by “dropping out” or counting the number of dropouts.  The good news is that taken as a whole the data show a slight decrease in the percentage of students dropping out over the past twenty five years.  The bad news is that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 6700 American students drop out of school every day.  In Missouri, Greene County ranks 102^nd out of the 115 counties in its annual high school dropout rate, and the data indicate that approximately 25% of the young people of our community fail to complete high school on time, if at all.  A fourth of our young people enter adulthood with a diminished chance for success in any of the endeavors which make up our common understanding of a “good life.”

Not many years ago there were jobs, even good jobs, that paid a living wage and required little education.  A school dropout had a chance.  Today many manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation or moved to developing countries, and the demands of available work--the kind of work that provides a reasonable level of economic security--require not only a high school but also a post-high school education.  It is not by accident that two-thirds of school dropouts are unemployed one year after leaving school, and unemployment rates for dropouts are double that of high school graduates.  It is not by accident that the lifetime earnings of dropouts is much less than for those who complete their education.

The economic costs of the dropout problem are not only personal, they are also societal.  Industry needs skilled workers and the productive capacity of educated workers; industry suffers when students drop out of school.  Because of their diminished earning power, dropouts as a whole make a proportionately smaller contribution through taxes, while the dysfunctions associated with dropping out–higher rates of admission to mental hospitals, higher rates of single parenthood, higher suicide rates, higher rates of incarceration (more than half the inmates in Missouri prisons lack a high school diploma; national studies show that up to 8 out of 10 inmates arrive at prison without a diploma)–all result in an enormous burden on the public sector and its tax dollars.

The societal costs of the high dropout rate are not limited to the economic costs.  The American experiment is one of self-government, with critical decisions resting in the hands of the electorate.  That burden was relatively simple a century ago, when the decisions facing elected officials involved matters that could be comprehended with relative ease.  It was not too great a challenge to know for whom to vote for leadership in the early commonwealth. 

Today we face the task of choosing leaders who can make wise decisions regarding genetic engineering, the degradation and exhaustion of the environment, the global economy in which national borders mean less and less, terrorism, the amalgamation of cultures, and rates of change which one writer described as a “firestorm.”  How can adults uninformed by even a high school education come to the knowledge and wisdom required of responsible voters, without which our kind of government–as our forefathers warned–cannot long survive?

And it is only by conjecture that we invite the reader to ponder the difficulties faced by school dropouts as they undertake the rigors of parenthood without even the minimal qualifications of twelve years of education to fall back on.

REASONS FOR DROPPING OUT

It is easy to slip into simplistic explanations and placing blame.  Indeed, in this whole issue we must beware of easy assumptions about cause and effect.  In foregoing paragraphs it must not be assumed that dropping out of school is the sole cause of youth violence or crime or single parenthood or whatever.  The causes are doubtless many and interrelated; what seems inescapable is the conclusion that dropping out of school is one of the important factors related to the difficulties our young people face.

It is equally true that the causes of dropping out are multiple, complex, and interrelated.  No one knows how to sort the whole thing out, but clues can be found in looking at research results which identify factors correlated with dropping out.  One can see that the seeds of dropping out are planted early in childhood, when for whatever reasons too many children fail to find self respect or self discipline,  the capacity to cope with problems in ways that are constructive, or any appreciation of the importance of or skills needed for learning.  Although none of these factors is limited to school dropouts, one can see in those results the strength of our culture’s emphasis on consumerism, and the weakness of the traditional value placed on deferred gratification.  One can see the lure of easy credit, monthly payments, and self-gratification.

Most of all the research on dropping out reveals families in trouble.  It shows families on the move (some of Springfield’s elementary schools have more than 100% turnover in the student population each year), families which over generations live in poverty (children from the poorest families in the U.S. are six times as likely to drop out as children from the richest families), families which are disproportionately characterized by single parenthood, lack of parenting skills, substance abuse, and who are loosely if at all tied to the community through neighborhood, church, or any other institution.  For too many students and their families, nothing that goes on in the schools seems relevant to anything that is happening to them, and it is OK not to go to school.  Expectations of school absenteeism followed by dropping out are characteristic of some of the sub-cultures of our community.

WHAT WE ARE DOING; WHAT WE NEED TO DO

Dropping out is not a symptom of failing schools.  It is a symptom of a community with problems.  It requires a response by the whole community.

And there are responses.  Head Start continues to help prepare youngsters for school.  Caring Communities has worked closely with both the Springfield Public Schools and northside neighborhoods for seven years to help children succeed in school and keep children and families healthy.  The Springfield school system has a successful Parents-As-Teachers program, the Storefront School, Solutions, Bailey High School, and an aggressive program to deal with truancy.  All of these, and other school initiatives, need to be understood by the community as a whole, and be supported. 

Some churches have come to the aid of the young.  Several churches have formed partnering relationships with York Elementary School in Springfield, a school with a high percentage of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.  These churches have set up after school programs of various kinds, all designed to help the children succeed in school.  Other churches are doing similar things in other parts of town.

The Rare Breed Youth Outreach Center, sponsored by the Kitchen,  has emerged in downtown Springfield, to provide counseling, safe shelter, recreation, and other services to meet basic needs of older youth who are living on the streets of the city.  Among the other services offered is encouragement to finish school or gain the GED.

The Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce is beginning to implement a program, patterned after a highly successful program of the St. Joseph Area Chamber of Commerce titled Profit in Education.  The program encourages partnerships with businesses in which the businesses agree not to hire dropouts unless the employee signs a covenant to pursue a high school equivalency diploma and attain a GED.  In St. Joseph, a decade after Profit in Education began with 19 participating businesses, the school dropout rate had dropped by 11.5% and 200 businesses were participating.  Hundreds of dropouts are completing their GED requirements each year.

It is important that we continue these, and seek additional ways to help the young complete their education.  Most important, however, is the need to provide to the very young the experiences which are essential to prepare them for success in school.  In many cases, the causes of dropping out of high school were set in place before the child entered school. 

Therefore:

 

• We must understand that educating our children involves not only traditional fields of learning, but also the development in early life of those capacities–self-awareness, empathy for others, self-motivation and discipline, responsibility, etc.–which are essential for success in school and also in later life.

• We must strengthen early childhood education and, whether through pre-school or church or neighborhood association or family, help the very young develop the curiosity, language skills, and other aptitudes which are essential for success in school.

• We must require kindergarten of all children in our community.

• We must emphasize literacy in the earliest school years and ensure that every child is comfortable with the written word and able to read at grade level by 3^rd grade..

• We must encourage and support our schools in their search, already underway, for non-conventional ways to reach those young people whose early lives leave them ill prepared for conventional education.

• We must find ways to provide mentoring for those children who have no other support system, and no other role models to help them find their way to successful and responsible adulthood.

• We must find ways to understand the culture and life style of the least fortunate among us, and help them write a new cultural script for their children.

• We must recognize that minority groups in our community have an especially difficult time being a part of the larger community, and find ways to reach out with understanding to bridge the differences which divide us.

• We must individually pay attention to what our schools are doing, and we must give the support necessary, including financial support, without which the schools cannot educate our children.

• We must provide information about and access to programmatic resources for parents of students who need special assistance.

IN CONCLUSION

The challenge is before us.  Too many of our children, about a fourth of them, are not even achieving a high school diploma.  They are handicapped for life.  They are our children, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “whose futures are spoken for.”

Their misfortune speaks to our failures as a community.  They will not be redeemed until every sector of our community–families, churches, business, government, the media, the non-profit sector–joins with the schools to find ways to guide and sustain the young.  We have the resources to provide early childhood education, if we could find the will to do so.  We have the capacity to provide safe places and a wholesome atmosphere for every child after school.  We have time enough to provide mentoring to every child who needs it.  We could provide internships in business for youth who are not among the “best and the brightest” and who are in danger of falling by the wayside.

In Missouri it costs an average of $20,000 per year to house one inmate; it costs a little over $6,000 per year to provide a year of education in the public schools.  An increasing proportion of our public dollars goes each year to the construction and operation of jails and prisons.  If we keep our children in school and if we help them learn to succeed, we will one day know the joy of not building jails and prisons. 

The rate of dropping out of school is only one of the symptoms of the difficulties facing the youth of our community.  To help mobilize the community not just to come to the rescue of youth who are in trouble, but to keep them from falling into trouble in the first place, the Good Community Committee is developing a new initiative called “Every Kid Counts.”  Every Kid Counts will not offer any direct services to the young, but it will pull together existing data, gather new data which no one is collecting now, issue an annual report card to the community on the status of the young, it will work to support existing youth programs and agencies, and it will work to bring the focus of the entire community on the well-being of its children and youth.

The Good Community Committee invites every citizen of our town and our county, every family, every organization, every institution, to join in the fight to keep our children in school and help give them a chance for a future with promise.

The Good Community Committee:

David Agee Rob Baird Harold Bengsch Nancy Brown Annie Busch Tom Carlson Dwight Colbaugh Bill Compere David Coonrod Arlen Diamond Mark Dixon Jack Ernst

Tom Finnie Brian Fogle Melissa Haddow Jim Hair Rex Hansen David Hockensmith Jan Horton Carol Hutchenson Jim Kabell John Keiser Pat Keohan Tracy Kimberlin

Don Landon Dottie Mullikin Norman Myers Denny Pilant Thomas Reidy Lynn Rowe Russ RuBert John Rush Karen Shannon Maura Taylor Polly VanDoren-Orr Lloyd Young, Chair

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