True North

Emily at X Pespective - a high school principal - went to a funeral for a former student killed in an unspecified crime.  And she pondered:

According to stats from 2004-06, black students in MN are currently graduating at a rate of 62%. Antoine did graduate, as did all the boys I knew who were at his memorial today.

What did that get him? Or the rest of them? Two had gone on to college, but neither is going back. The rest - not so much.

Two assertions here, just to set the stage:

1. Violence in the city is a result of a whole big slew of social pathologies - poverty, drug abuse, crime, and above all the disintegration of the family - that, after forty years of government intervention, have gotten worse rather than better.
2. The whole rationale for compulsory education in the first place was to recitify damaging social pathologies (which, in the late 1800s, were “immigrants’ socialist ideals”)

By that measure, the experiment at public education has failed.  To be fair, I don’t know that our society could give schools enough power to “save” kids from the damage wrought by generations of subsidized poverty; I doubt society would want to live with the consequences of giving any part of government that much power.

(/libertarian tangent)

Overall, MN is down to an 85% graduation rate, though 91% of the state’s current workforce has graduated from high school. Why the drop? Why are kids opting not to finish? What does the diploma offer them that they can’t get without it? What does it guarantee?

All good questions - but Emily missed one.  Looking at Minnesota’s overall graduation rate is misleading; outstate rates are higher; indeed, the smaller the school, the higher the graduation rate.  The metro is dragging the state’s numbers down hard.

Why the drop - why are kids not finishing school?  Because in a society where poverty is subsidized, where hard work within “the system” is derided, where almost none of the cultural role models is a poster-child for getting an education, what is the motivation to finish school?

What does the diploma offer or guarantee?  Nothing.  Nor should it guarantee anything, except that the bearer is literate and capable of functioning in our society - and with today’s high school education, that’s a bit of a crapshoot.  I’m not even talking in terms of conservative bromides about ultraliberal educational academics and PC mandates; I think notion of the value of the high school diploma is a holdover from an era when the diploma was a rarity.  Today, while its an assumption for much of productive society, the notion that it has value beyond that is, I think, an obsolete idea.

How to fix or replace it?

Well, that’s a longer article.

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.