I firmly believe that we, as a nation, need to address the national high school dropout crisis, an issue about which I am not only passionate but one which will largely define our nation’s long-term competitiveness and the well-being of our citizens. I’ve had the great honor of serving on the board of the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network (www.dropoutprevention.org) for the past six years and effective this January, am now serving as Chairman.
While the NDPC/N’s fifteen effective strategies for reducing dropouts have been embraced by thousands of educators across the nation, we still have a very long way to go. Only 7 in 10 high school students graduate with their peer class, nationally yielding half a million dropouts per year. Said another way by the NDPC/N, imagine 12,000 school buses per year leaving our nation’s school parking lots to carry home students who never return.
The costs are staggering at both the individual and aggregate levels. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (www.census.gov), high school dropouts can expect to earn almost $10,000 less per year than high school graduates, obviously impacting quality of life for individuals and their families in significant and measurable ways. In aggregate, the federal government and our states not only lose billions of dollars worth of tax receipts each year, but simultaneously become further saddled with skyrocketing costs of social services and incarceration.
An enormous problem … yet so many of our school reforms don’t seem to move the ed needle in any meaningful and measurable way.. So where do we go from here?
Contributing Blogger: Stuart Udell, CEO of Penn Foster