Whereas the conventional wisdom had long placed the graduation rate around 85 percent, a growing consensus has emerged that only about seven in 10 students are actually successfully finishing high school.
The Education Research Center has just come out with the results of a study that show that our national graduation rate is about 70%. (PDF here.) The trends when you look a little deeper are even more disturbing.
We barely get half of Native Americans through high school; just over half of Blacks and Hispanics. One in four girls is not graduating from high school. One in three boys aren’t.
Damn.
Let’s look at the numbers for the home teams. Nashville has thirteen school districts in what the study calls the metropolitan area serving 55,521 high school students and 31.5% of those students are in the Metro school system. Memphis also has thirteen school districts in the metro area. It has slightly fewer high school students in the metro area–55,133–but 51.7% of them are in the Memphis City School district.
Nashville’s Metro school system is third in the country (among the 50 largest cities in the country)–graduating 77% of its students. Memphis is ranked fourteenth and graduates 61.7% of its students. (By contrast, seventeen of the 50 largest cities can’t even get half of their students to graduation. And, word to the wise, if you have kids in Baltimore, Cleveland, Indianapolis, or Detroit, you might want to consider home schooling.)
The other thing the study looked at was the graduation rates between the urban districts and the suburban districts within metropolitan areas. So, for Nashville, within the whole metropolitan area, graduates 81% of students–Metro graduates, as I said, 77%, and the suburban districts graduate almost 83%. Here’s something really interesting. The graduation rate in the whole Memphis metro area is 58.7%. The urban districts graduate 61.7% and the suburban districts only graduate 55.5% (making Memphis, Phoenix, Tuscon, Albuquerque, and Colorado Springs the five cities in which you’re better off to be in the urban schools than the suburban schools. In Baltimore, by way of comparison, 34.6% of urban kids graduate while 81.5% of suburban kids graduate, making the largest gap in the nation.).
So, there you go. We’re number three (and fourteen)! We’re number three (and fourteen)!
It should be appalling that one in five of our teenagers can’t make it through high school, but because the rest of the country is doing an even shittier job… well, we come out looking like we’re doing pretty okay.
Edited to Add: Looking at the whole South is pretty scary. I mean, god damn, South Carolina and Georgia. What are you doing down there?
Filed under: About Town
After three years working in a Metro high school, my wife swore our kids would never go to school in Davidson County. She’s dragging me out to Mount Juliet to keep her promise.
That sounds about right. I don’t talk to a lot of teens, but many of them are dopes.
I’m more surprised that NJ scored so high.
It’s New Jersey!?
If you’d ever been to Crittenden county, Arkansas or North Mississippi, you’d not be surprised by the “suburban” Memphis figure. If Memphis City and Shelby County (there are two governments there as opposed to Nashville/Davidson), the figures would be different.
The boyfriend and I were just talking about this last night in reference to a piece on NASA. Barney Frank doesn’t see the value in NASA, but there was a time in this country when kids aspired to be engineers and astronauts because of the space program–and they went to college to do so. Now? They aspire to be pop stars and reality tv “personalities.” No need to graduate high school or college to do that.
ps–re: North Mississippi–I had a friend who moved to Mount Juliet because she didn’t want her son to go to school in Mississippi like she did. She left behind a job and all her family; that’s how bad it is there.
Lesley, but a NASA type of effort toward energy independence would be great…in fact, perhaps we could re-tool NASA to do just that. I see no need for space exploration until we solve some major problems closer to home.
Well, except that NASA does a lot more than just explores space. I don’t think there’s any need to get rid of NASA. If anything, we should fund it better
But that’s also no reason why we shouldn’t also have an energy independence initiative.
Lesley, my fear is that they’re not aspiring to do anything at all. I don’t know. One in three high school boys isn’t going to graduate. That number is so staggering to me I almost don’t know what to do with it.
You hear those family-values types piss and moan about unwed mothers, but, frankly, a girl would be taking an enormous financial risk to marry a guy without a high-school diploma. Their decision to remain single is actually the sound decision.
Wow is about all I can say to it.
I second that, Mack. I’d like to see the context of Barney Frank’s statements, Lesley. If you have a link, that would be much appreciated. That aside, NASA’s heyday was the late 60s to mid-70s, when the federal government needed a major p.r. boost to try and draw attention from the political unrest that was ubiquitous back then. If you were a suburban or exurban denizen, what would you rather see on the teevee news: images of men walking on the moon, or stories about your government (at any given level) violating the constitutional rights of your fellow citizens (a la COINTELPRO)?
Practically speaking, NASA is now little more than a satellite maintenance service. Why waste taxpayer revenue on substantive space exploration when there are plenty of earthbound media-borne distractions available from the corporate sector*? If you’re a contemporary elected official, you’re probably more likely to direct the taxpayers’ gold toward some war profiteering corporate conglomerate. That’s where the real campaign contributions are going to come from, not from the inventor of the next Space Pen.
But on the larger subject of our public education’s dire straits, I’m not at all surprised. One of this nation’s congenital defects is its tendency to commodify everything (even people). At the macro level, the concept of public education can only work if people view education as a fundamental human right, and not a commodity that can be bundled into the costs of a suburban McMansion. But that gets into larger entwined issues of class, ‘race’, and how we define community. I don’t feel like talking about that shit today.
*This might explain why more kids aspire to pop-stardom than to space exploration.
because that same argument could just as validly be used to shut down all basic science?
granted, there’s no particular reason why the lifter vehicles need be government-funded. i love the various X-prizes, and the creative insanity of Richard Branson, for funding and developing private access to space. any of y’all’s kids asking for a reason to go to college? well, i’m pretty sure having a degree would really help if they want to get hired by Burt Rutan.
Lesley is right about Mississippi public school – and this is nothing new. I attended public school in North Mississippi – Northeast, to be exact. I graduated about 15 years ago and even then my parents refused to send me to school in my hometown. They acquired an address in a neighboring town because my hometown school was (still is) under a federal court order to not release students from the school system. Other parents in my hometown did the same things, or sent their children to private schools.
I can’t say I know what the problem is now, but the problem back then, according to mine and other concerned parents, was that the “smartest” students were not rewarded by being placed in classes that nurtured their learning level. The students that scored highest were distributed throughout classrooms with other students who were either disruptive or scored significantly lower on the test that determined placement. This is the story I remember hearing a while back – I’m sure I’ve forgotten some crucial details, so forgive me…
Currently, my hometown’s school system is in dire straits because of the parents lack of, excuse me, giving a s**t. For example, within the past few years, a new superintendent was brought in to overhaul the school system. He had a stellar record of turning around school systems – test scores to prove it – to match his impressive resume’. His first act of business was instituting a dress code and enacting a zero tolerance for teachers that didn’t perform. How was he rewarded? The school board fired him, with the backing of the parents.
The major difference I do recall from my high school years was the fact that the friends I had who attended school in my hometown always talked about how they were told to “get by” by any means necessary (i.e. “cheat”).
At the public school I attended, the mantra “EXCEL” was drilled into us on a daily basis. And I am thankful for that.
All I know is, students who have had every care and attention lavished on them, and who were insulated (by taking AP classes) from the horror of having to share a classroom with kids who weren’t as smart as they are, don’t know a thing when they get to college, either. The number of times I have had college freshmen say they can’t remember a thing from high school, because they didn’t actually learn thing to know or remember them, they learned them to pass a test and then forget them, is depressing. I remember how happy I was the first time I had a class full of kids who had come in with AP work in the topic I was teaching — and I remember that it took me all of two weeks to become completely cynical about what that meant in terms of their abilities or even the information they were capable of using.
And as for Barney Frank/NASA, I’m pretty sure that Frank is opposed to funding any manned space-flights. A lot of people are, since unmanned flights are just as good for gathering information, and sending people into space is seen as an indulgence. I’m not part of that crowd myself, since I remember being a starry-eyed kid and I still want to see the whole Earth. Pictures just don’t do it for me. But I can at least figure out where that idea comes from. I never heard that Frank wanted to defund NASA, though.
Why waste taxpayer revenue on substantive space exploration
The Space program brought about huge advances in medical science and computer science due to a need for miniaturization and remote monitoring. Most heart monitoring equipment (not to mention personal computers) got its start in space.
NM, if what you surmise about Frank is true, then I’m with Frank. While some space shuttle flights might be necessary now, there is no need for another boondoggle like the Apollo program. While I don’t contend that the space program has been a total waste, there were better ways to spend large amounts of the money we spent there*.
But I don’t mean to pick on NASA; it will have a lot more value if we can ever get our shit together here on Earth. There are a lot ways we waste money that are far less constructive than NASA. Forcing our schools to depend on unstable sources of revenue while we pour money into missile shields and other anachronistic weapon systems is a sign that we don’t have our shit together.
*For perspective’s sake: keep in mind that while the Great Society was being garroted, slashed, and dessicated, we were sending men deep into space to traipse across a lifeless orb and sending them half a world away to rain hell on Southeast Asia.
Right, Jim, but, who knows where all that effort and money, funneled into a balls -out effort for alternatives to internal combustion engines, for instance, might ultimately lead us?
NASA already has the big (whats it called?) mainframe? computers, plus research disciplines in place, plus, all the damn scientists. I’m not advocating abandoning space exploration, just placing it on hold for a bit.
Or, we can send the one third that drops out of high school into space….forever.
OK, complete Barney Frank quote from the Washington Post, June 28, 2006: “The manned shot to Mars is a pure boondoggle.”
I appreciate the historical fact that we have a lot of technological advances that were byproducts of NASA, but if that’s the main argument for the value of the program, why don’t we just pay people to sit around and think stuff up instead of using the pretense of occasionally launching the same old shuttle? I’m a science geek, but I need more than “Some stuff that happened accidentally on the side” to be convinced of the value of a program.
Has anyone thought about merging all the graduation rates for a SMSA, including private schools and home schooling? It doesn’t make what is happening for public school students better but it gives a more objective picture of who might be going to college, technical school or seeking employment. AND it doesn’t mean that private/home school are doing any better at educating the kids, as opposed to just graduating them. Science and math literacy are critical thinking skills and different and unique from language literacy.
nm is correct. Sending people into space is an overpriced, unnecessary luxury. Even when the space shuttle system was launched, there was talk about it being obsolete, but the program had been in development for years. Notice how no other country followed suit? When the Challenger blew up, many people wanted to bag the program, then again when Discover blew up.
I think we should send Scotsmen up in experimental spacecraft.
you guys are really disillusioning me here. i always thought the trope about us left-wingers being anti-technology luddites unwilling to support proper engineering and good science was a slander. heck, i hadn’t even heard anybody using that line for dogs’ ages.
we need spaceflight because we need something to dream about, dammit. we need something tangible to point at and say to ourselves, that’s where we can go as a species if we work at it.
take a look at a few Hubble images and try to call that project worthless. read a little about the science it’s done, the things it’s taught us about this universe, and tell me we’d've been better off without knowing them.
without manned spaceflight, the HST could not have been kept operating this long, nor done a fraction of what it has done. without the shuttle in particular (which i’m in no way used to defending, mind — miserable boondoggle of a heavy lifter, bring me back the Saturn any day) it could not have been launched to begin with. and that’s just one deep-space astronomy project out of everything NASA does and has done. wanna be really impressed? take a look at the “pale blue dot” image, read Sagan’s essay to match, and just you try not to choke up over it, i dare you.
well, okay, the Voyagers didn’t need manned spaceflight. but once you get the lifters to put large, heavy cargoes up high or on fast trajectories far out, you already have 90% of all that manned spaceflight needs, so why not finish that job and give kids one more almost-but-not-quite-impossible career option to dream about?
Hey, I was pointing out that some people are against manned spaceflight; I’m not against it myself. As I noted above, I wanna go out and see the earth from space. It’s not the pale blue dot pix that get me. No, I’m old enough to remember the first “whole Earth” pictures, and the shock of that beauty will never leave me.
I agree with Nomen Nescio, above… people need to hope and dream about.
I was that kid that was mesmerized by the Mars rover and the shuttle lift offs. I was born in ‘75, and felt cheated that I missed the moon shot stuff and as if I was playing “catch up” on the space program as a kid, as all that moon stuff was rather fresh at the time… and I geeked out watching the HBO series “From The Earth to the Moon” — those guys were the last truly great trailblazers. And I’m still kicking myself for not pestering my parents to send me to Spacecamp
I have zero desire to leave Earth and go to space, (I’m not terribly wild about flying), but I admire the hell out of those men and women who have the courage to strap themselves to a rocket and blast off for worlds unknown.
Call me silly and a dreamer, but without something to hope and dream and aspire to, what point in there in sticking around?
“Hear! Hear!” to Nomen Nescio & Beth.
Also, Exador, it was Columbia that we lost in ‘03, not Discovery.
I think there are many, many advantages to our having a space program, mainly the value of research.
Mack,
You mean Scotsmen like Neil Armstrong, John McKay and Jim McDivitt?
It’s okay, you can still be proud of Jose Jimenez.
I hate to interrupt everyone’s hoping and dreaming, but let’s remember what Aunt B.’s post is about here. We have a worsening crisis in our education system (such as it is). Why are kids dropping out? It’s easy to point the finger at the kids themselves– as some seem willing to do– but where did these kids develop their apathy and ignorance? Whither went their natural desire to learn and explore?
Think about this, now. Most of the kids who are now high school age were born about the time we were bombing the shit out of Iraq (the first time). They grew up on Monicagate and the Contract on America. And yes, their first impressions of the space program were likely either media references to its biggest failure to date (the aforementioned Challenger explosion) or talk of turning the space around our planet into a shooting gallery.
Combine this with an educational system that is haphazardly funded and under legislative assault, a system that we have allowed to be subjected to something so egregious as No Child Left Behind, and can you see why a lot of these kids– especially those who attend schools in our most vulnerable communities– might get the hint that we as a society really don’t give a fuck about them getting an education?
I have a two-year-old, so now I understand completely how kids have a built-in bullshit detector. It might take them decades to process the details of the bullshit, but they know when their parents (and other adults) are full of shit. When my daughter has to go to an underfunded school with a lot of kids who have seriously unattended problems, or when she gets uprooted by her parents (either to a new home address or by being bused for an hour) for the sake of getting her into a ‘good school,’ she’s going to start developing her values based on that fucked-up situation, and she’s going to start understanding the bullshit that her parents (and their parents) have left for her to deal with. And when she starts to understand the other problems that we dreamers and hopers are leaving for her, I’ll be happy if she wants to bother going to university, much less give a fuck about sending men to Mars.
Nomen, it’s a pretty big jump from “we need to prioritize our spending, and think about the best use of NASA” to “lefties are anti-technology.”
Exador, I’m not surprised that NJ did well on education. I spent most of middle-school and some of high-school in NJ, and those schools were awesome. My HS had five years each of French, Spanish, German, and Latin (years 4 and 5 taken concurrently, since one was Lit.). My freshman history course was “College Prep European History”, and it was great.
The Alabama HS that I transferred into was a nasty shock. It seems to me that communities that refuse to pay for education don’t get much.
I only pick on NJ because, well, everybody picks on NJ.
It seems that most of the high tech stuff that applies to NASA also applies to the military, but I can hear the liberals moaning about “The Propaganda” when these careers are shown in the Army of 1 ads.
Allow me a moment to play the role of Church Secretary, who seems to have forgotten the important point here…
Actually, if I’m going to be Church Secretary for any length of time, you’re going to have to give me a second for flexing with my shirt off in front of a mirror, peeing on things while standing, and grinning and winking at women as I walk down the street. Also, I might have to hit Mack in the arm, since I would have the muscles to do it.
But that’s beside the point. Here’s what I as Church Secretary want to say: Why would we cut funding from NASA? Why don’t we cut funding from our decades’ long commitment to going into countries, bombing the shit out of them, and leaving them in worse shape than we found them, but now pissed off at us?
Sure, maybe NASA’s not the most practical thing in the world. But you know who gets killed by NASA? People who signed up and knew the risks when they signed up.
Going back to just being me, it seems that the education crisis in our country probably ties in more with the rise of the “let’s just incarcerate everyone” mentality and the “let’s treat all teenagers, especially boys, as dangerous criminals who must be dealt with like that” mentality than the “let’s waste some money on NASA” mentality.
May I remind you that we have privately owned prisons in this country? Prisons that are designed to be profitable. Prisons that therefore have no stake in lowering the rate of incarcerated people in this country. In fact, they have just the opposite stake.
As we move towards being a country of people constantly under government surveillance and government telling us what to do, folks are going to buckle under the pressure.
B., you’d make an excellent me. Except for the winking part; I only flirt with women I know. Anyway, I prefer you being you. You’re way sexier that way.
But I’m with you here: the problem isn’t that people want to spend money to explore outer space. Hell, I came of age watching Star Trek. The problem is that we’ve got our priorities all out of whack. (This discussion reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in fact.) If we can’t get our shit together down here, what’s the point in getting all gaga about what’s out there?
And your point about increasing government control is well taken. It’s really sad that we are bankrolling not only the privatization of our commons, but also the solidification of our very own police state. But I guess that’s where a failing education system comes in handy. If not enough people know enough to care about what our country is supposed to be, then we’ll be that much easier to manipulate. A nation of ignorant, fear-stricken Wal-Mart shoppers.
Sigh.
CS, I wouldn’t want to be you permanently. I have too much fun with my boobs to give them up, even for peeing standing up. But I do think it’d be fun to be you long enough to do those few things. You could be me during that time and I/you would wink at you/me, just for giggles.
Anyway, yes, I’m not sure I have anything more to say on the topic at hand, just that it scares me that so many of us Americans are leaving school before graduating–because talk about making your life more difficult! Wow.
B., I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the sci-fi/fantasy show “Farscape,” but there is thisone episode that is by far the funniest treatment of body-switching I’ve ever seen. If you’re able to, I suggest you rent and watch it.
Of course, one of my current favorites is “Torchwood.” With all the sexual fluidity of that show, I half expect them to do their own body-switching episode any day now.
My apologies for starting up the NASA discussion and then leaving for 24 hours!
I’m in complete agreement with Nomen…a generation or so ago, kids aspired to be pilots and astronauts and college was the only way to get there. Our culture no longer grants these people the rock star status they once had. But pumping up NASA and manned space flights might help to make careers that require education glamorous again. If footage from Mars makes it onto the news more than Bald Britney, perhaps we can shift our society’s priorities back where they belong.
Yeah, it’s a big dream and a gamble, but it’s something.
And see: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/04/60minutes/main3994925_page3.shtml for the context of Barney Frank’s comments. I think he’s being short-sighted. And, yeah, I’d rather see the money for the Iraq war go just about anywhere other than that war. NASA would be a good place to start.
okay lets drop the NASA thread for a bit, and look at some of the reality, yes the school sytems a failing, and no offense but some parents are also, children are not growing up in the same enviroment now that we did.
To make matters worse ex: you have a child of a family the is barely making it and there child is not eligble for grants, and not eligble for a scholarships (which is not an uncommon thing); the child knows that by the time they graduate there will be nothing out there for them. There are no longer the abundence of middle class no college experience jobs left in America, and the child feels helpless and lost. I am not say by any means that the child should just give up, or that is what the child should do under in circumstances, but trying to look through the eyes of the child I can see his dellema.
.Children today are crippled by poor goverment and inexusable school systems.
IT IS TIME FOR A CHANGE we use to be a strong powerfull capable of anything (like making steels)counrty becouse of the of all classes), it is time to get that back!