Education - Dropout Mills

This morning CBS has a story on Dropout Factories http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/29/national/main3425857.shtml where over 60% of high school students drop out before graduation. They are not diploma mills, rather they are Dropout Mills. Here are a few thoughts on the education and poverty issue.

We are a nation of three classes. The first two classes as defined by our president during a fund raising event are the haves and have mores. And then there are the rest of us. Within the rest of us are the pockets of extreme and persistent poverty and underclass. It is within those last two you find these dropout mills.

My wife is a teacher that entered the profession later in life. As a Navy family we moved a lot and only after my retirement and our settling down was she able to pursue her chosen profession. With in the last 12 years she has worked in middle schools in both low income and upper middle class schools. The differences between the two are obvious for anyone willing to look. In the lower income areas all most 90% of the children are on subsidized lunch program. Their parents are not home, because they work multiple minimum wage jobs just to survive. Often the only food some of these kids would get would be the lunches at school and over weekends many eat little or nothing. A child in these schools that gets sick can not go to a doctor so the parents wait until the child can not move and then runs them to the county emergency rooms.

This study in the CBS report and dozens if not hundreds of other such studies tell us the same thing. Poverty pockets breed poverty and maintain an underclass where crime of all sorts is concentrated. One only has to look at a map of any of our major cities that depict locations of murders and other crimes to realize children in these areas are exposed to horrors that no child should be exposed to and that children in even moderately better neighborhoods are not exposed to.

The study points out that Utah is void of these dropout mills. Why is Utah an example of non-drop out mills? Is it because there are no poor people living there? I doubt that. But with a small population it is most likely there are less concentrated areas of poverty, poor kids still are on the subsidized lunch programs, and still go to emergency rooms, but they go to school with middle class and even the have more kids. They are surrounded by examples of how to better themselves. Their graduation rates, I bet, are within the norm of the other children.

I read an essay a year or so ago from one of the “scholars” at the Hoover Institute in California. He was building a case against couples living together without getting married or some other moral issue by using Sweden as an example of how when a society allows such things the bad morals of the underclass creep up to the "have and have mores".

How is that possible for bad morals of the underclass to creep up to the upper classes? The article said it was because of the disappearance of the underclass in Sweden, thus all the evil morals of the underclass were transferred to the upper class. How did Sweden (and all the Nordic countries) all but eliminate them? Two reasons were given, basic health care for all their citizens and public education up to and including college. There are poor people in these countries, but their children have the very same opportunities as other citizens. They call it “family values.”

Now before conservatives scream about the socialist in Sweden and other Nordic countries take a quick look at some interesting “capitalist” statistics from The Economist issue of October 20, 2007:

GDP change for 2007 shows the US at a 2.0% growth and Sweden at 3.4% growth, Netherlands at 2.2% growth and Norway at 3.5% growth.

Balance of trade (in billions of $) over the last 12 months shows the US at – 810.7, Denmark at + 4.2, Sweden at + 18.1, Norway at + 54.5 and Netherlands at + 49.9.

Oh but they are in massive public debt you say – well here are the current account balance for government spending over the same 12 months (in billion $):

US is in the hole by another – 793.2, Denmark up a + 4.3, Sweden up a + 29.7, Netherlands up a + 53.5, and Norway up a + 54.6. Now why you might ask would we want our government to have that much cash on hand? Well those countries also have a lot of baby boomers about to retire, looks like they are prepared.

A little more on the "haves and have mores." Based on figures from the IRS on incomes in 2005 the top one percent of income earners now have a lager piece of the economic pie than any other time since the Roaring Twenties and the median income is down below what it was in 2000. Just this morning McClatchy News service is running an article about the increase of poor children in public schools. According to the article in 2000 there were only four states with a majority of it's students being poor. There are now, as of 2006, FOURTEEN states with a majority of students being poor. The article can be found here http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/20922.html .

Have a great day and keep fighting for ALL our children and all our schools.

Randy T