← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Six
Thread ID: 17505 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-03-24
2005-03-24 23:57 | User Profile
[url]http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/25/content_2740348.htm[/url]
LOS ANGELES, March 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Nearly half of the Latino and African American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education,the Los Angeles Times said Thursday.
"The situation was even worse, with just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduating, compared with 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians" in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the paper quoted a Hardvard University report as saying.
The report, released on Wednesday, 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.
California Department of Education reported that 87 percent of students graduated in 2002, but researchers pegged the rate at just 71 percent. According to the analysis, about 68 percent of all high school students in the United States graduate on time.
The troubling graduation rates are most alarming in minority communities, where students are more likely to attend what researchers call "dropout factories", according to the report by researchers from Harvard and other universities.
The exodus of tens of thousands of students before 12th grade is exacting significant social and economic costs through higher unemployment, increased crime and billions of dollars in lost revenue, it added.
Researchers found that African Americans and Latinos in the state were far less likely to graduate than their white and Asian peers, reflecting an achievement gap that first appears in elementary schools.
Russell Rumberger, an education professor of the University of California at Santa Barbara, estimated that high dropout rates of high school students in California could cost the state 14 billion dollars in lost wages over the students' lifetimes, and add 1,225 inmates to state prisons.
"There are huge social costs" associated with high dropout rates,including "lower wages, higher unemployment, poorer health, lower tax revenues, increased crime," the professor said.
The Harvard report said that current education policies, including those that require annual standardized testing of students, may exacerbate the dropout crisis by creating "unintended incentives for school officials to push out low-achieving students".
The federal No Child Left Behind education law requires annual testing in most grade levels and also calls for schools to report their high school graduation rates annually. Under the law, schools must raise their test scores and graduation rates or face possible sanctions.
2005-03-25 00:45 | User Profile
China is graduating 350,000 engineers PER YEAR, that should tell you something.
AGAIN teach your kids Chinese and Spanish, they will love you later on for that.