School Graduation Rates Fudged

The Daily Southerner in Tarboro, N.C. tell us that graduation rates in N.C. are fudged. The national graduation rate, estimated at 74% in 1998 was revised down to 71% when re-examined by Jay P. Greene at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Earlier today, the Daily Southerner reported that estimates are grossly off base in N.C. "North Carolina's high school graduation rate of more than 90 percent is misleading because the state doesn't include dropouts in its tally." This is an old trick and one that boosted N.C. numbers from 63% to 90%. It works like this. 90% of high school students who stayed in school passed enough classes to graduate. But the real question is how many entering Freshman graduate. That number is 63% for North Carolina. Given that the national numbers are in the low 70%'s, this isn't all that bad. What shocks me is that so many people opt out of an education at all. Some places will tend to provide alternatives to a liberal education in a small town world view and local, rural employment. Some families just don't support education because they don't see any value to it. But a 71% graduation rate?

Someone needs to tell students (apparently as freshman, and maybe earlier) that there are three forces that make the abandonment of education a dangerous path. They include mechanization, globalization, and customer self service. When I shop at a local grocery store I can ring up my own groceries. I have been paying at the pump for years now. This is customer self-service enabled by new technology. Sometimes new technology occurs right at the workplace and reduces the number of workers required to produce a desired quantity of goods. Sometimes the work is done by foreign workers who get the opportunity to work in factories or offices doing work that used to be done by Americans rather than collecting bits of garbage for cash. I think its cruel and foolish to deny people around the world the opportunity to move out of subsistence economies because we are too shortsighted to educate ourselves and prepare our children for a modern work environment.

Since students who drop out often did not get productive use of the years of school prior to their abandonment of the school, we are talking about people who usually squeak past basic literacy. The purpose of school is not primarily to produce good workers, its to produce a free people capable of governing themselves and pursuing the good life. [ed. for those who didn't catch it, I mean this in an Aristotelian sense] The virtue of such an education is that everything else takes care of itself. When any kind of education isn't completed the problems that result are serious.

Fudging the data to make everthing look peachy is an attempt to pretend the problem isn't there.