Posted on 06/18/2004 9:13:40 PM PDT by wagglebee
June 17, 2004 -- The Big Apple could be called Dropout City — a staggering 350,000 public high-school students have quit or flunked out of school since 1986, Department of Education data show.
That means the number of New York City dropouts over this period exceeds the entire population of such cities as St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Buffalo, St. Paul, Minn., and Newark.
The number of dropouts was disclosed during testimony at a City Council hearing on the Bloomberg administration's plan to open 70 new small schools next fall with startup funds provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
"New York City's dropout rate remained constant at 30 percent for a decade. Indeed, since the Board of Education first kept track in 1986, over 250,000 students had dropped out of school by 2000," said Robert Hughes, president of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit group that helps the city develop small schools.
In fact, it's about 300,000 dropouts over that period. The city measures the dropout rate by tracking students until they turn 21, when they're legally required to leave secondary school.
The final data is not in for the years 2001-2003, but the city already knows that 39,181 students in these three graduation classes had dropped out by the age of 18. If trends continue, another 20,000 to 25,000 students aged 19-21 still in the system will quit.
"That's pretty remarkable," said council Education Committee Chairwoman Eva Moskowitz (D-Manhattan).
A top adviser to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein also cited the high dropout rate and low graduation rate — only one of every two high school students obtains a diploma on time — as reason to overhaul the city high schools.
"Dropout rates have been increasing since 1998," said Michele Cahill, the chancellor's senior counselor on educational policy. "Even starker challenges characterize many of our traditionally large, comprehensive zoned high schools with graduation rates below 40 percent."
Mayor Bloomberg plans to open a total of 200 schools with 500 students or less over the next few years in an attempt to help struggling kids achieve.
Cahill pointed to some of the existing smaller high schools in low-income neighborhoods, which have higher graduation rates (58 percent to 37 percent) of similar students in high schools with thousands of students.
But Moskowitz said smaller is not necessarily better without a strong principal and dedicated staff. She pointed to the dreadful performance of several small high schools, including those located at the Erasmus HS campus in Brooklyn.
Most of the 70 new schools will be assigned to existing facilities with other schools.
Teachers union president Randi Weingarten, while backing the small-schools movement, complained that the Bloomberg administration's decision last year to cram new schools into buildings with existing schools worsened overcrowding and safety conditions. She said functioning large schools should not be sacrificed to make way for these smaller schools.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Also means more feebleminded future voters for Hillary!
Can you blame them?
And more deadbeat welfare recipients!
The charge won't be Bush, but racism, which reads the same to your good New York liberal. This month's Harpers has a gorgeous map of the inequties in L.A. County schooling, and, oh, how awful it is that the failures are in the lower class black and hispanic districts... Gee, how 'bout rather than pissing on the better schools, why not emulate them -- in every way, not just in funding?
It's all a stunning indictment of the failure of liberal America. So sad, though, that they'll look for inadequacies in "the system" rather than in the players in it, especially the students.
Heh, New York: how 'bout holding the kids to the fire for a minute or two? You coddle 'em until you have no choice but to let 'em go. They should have been failed out in the 7th grade, or earlier, but you chose to slide 'em up until the last. Sure, blame the President for holding you accountable for the 12th grade. Now, go look at your younger students and imagine them a few years ahead.
There is no solution here until the communities of New York, and around this nation, demand that their students do well. It starts at home, yes, but it's top to bottom wrong. A good, vicious revolution in schooling is needed. But nobody is willing to put up with the casaulties.
Meanwhile, the students bleed dumb.
Just think what that number of dropouts per year will do to a city!!
And that was in the snow, after walking 5 miles barefoot, fighting wolves...just kidding. I think it was about the same in the late '60's for my era.
Give them a break. They need to start a cheering section in the populace so that the teachers' unions will have
competition in the media.
At least I hope that's what they're doing. Otherwise, that events in that ridiculous disaster movie might be the only
way to clean the school system.
Eva, clearly you have a firm command of the obvious. Yo Eva, in my neck of the woods we call it "embarrassing".
yeah well their jobs are in india so might as well drop out and search other types of employment like rap
and tv annoucers
Gosh, when I went to high school, 78% of tenth-graders failed the year, shattering the previous all-time record of 52% set the previous year. (Many of the failures were in both sets, from what I could tell.) I advanced to the eleventh grade on the first try and didn't even do all that much.
Many of the failures (and especially the repeat-failures) could be described best as criminals, whether chronically addicted to drugs, drug traders, regular truants, or those with more violent tendencies. Because they committed their crimes on school property, they were not prosecuted (because of school rules).
These failures generally attended class irregularly, rarely if ever attentively, never studied, made no effort whatsoever, and frequently refused to comply with tests, quizzes, and other bases for grades. By "refused to comply with test," I mean that they did not make a reasonable effort to write vaguely rational answers to the questions asked, sufficiently pertinent to suggest that persons might have read the question, and to give the test to the teacher at the conclusion of the time allotted for such examination. Many cheated regularly.
A very good (and hence rare) ninth-grade teacher explained this phenomenon to me. He had provoked the ire of the school administration for sending notice of intent to fail an all-time record (in 20+ years of teaching) 97% of one of his "regular" classes. Confronted by an administrator during my (honors) class, he explained that when he started teaching, the honors students were here (at the level of his neck) and the regular students were here (at the level of his heart). Nowadays, he continued, the honors students are still where they always were, but the regular students are here (touching his boot).
He then began to detail the litany of various activities that were commonplace in the failing class, noting that they had become more commonplace in recent years: fistfights, book-throwing, obvious hangovers, chatting using vulgar language, generally ignoring the teacher, burning copies of the test rather than writing answers, failure to attend class for weeks on end, hurling scientific equipment across the room, .... Of course, many of these behaviors violated school rules, but with 35 bandits and one student who actually wants to pass the class, handling these disciplinary problems is not easy.
This occurred in 1995.
The point is that a deeply disturbing proportion of today's high-school students students have fallen beyond the ability of teachers and school personnel to instruct them or to influence their behavior. The blame lies on these students themselves, on their parents, and to some extent on the overwhelming proportion of entirely disinterested and incompetent middle-school teachers operating largely without any curriculum whatsoever.
i teach at one of the best high schools in los angeles.
Each year we start with 900 9th graders, and each year 400 seniors graduate.
Actually the los angeles times ran one article that told this story rather well, it was not discussed a few days after.
Almost all high schools in los angeles have worse records than this.
Obviously we are not commenting on what those 400 have accomplished.
''That's the sound of the man (sic) work-ing on the chain ga-a-ang....''
Meanwhile, the students bleed dumb.
Worth repeating.
It's obvious what the problem is--we need to throw more money at the situation.
Don't worry, it's just the poor, the minorities, and the immigrants. But don't worry, with the Liberals in control in NY will help them as they have in the past with more welfare so they don't have to have a diploma or know how to read. It would be criminal to give good solid Dimocrat votes a leg up to prosperity and Republicanism, they have to keep them in virtual slavery to Dim largesse.
Just look at Detroit, The example of how NOT to run a city.
The city refused, citing the idea of 'separation of church and state' which was totally bogus. The city wouldn't be subsidizing religion, just a better education than the city was delivering.
Just think, 1000 of those dropouts could possibly have been saved from their lives of ignorance, but for the stupidity and parochialism of the NY City School Board.
Washington DC - 570,898 population
78% high school grads
69.2% minority population
(Trying to be as "PC" as I can here)
DC Murder Totals per year exceed 2003-2004 Iraq + Afghanistan combined average military combat deaths from enemy per year....
(DC is 100% gun banned for the last 27 years!)
Hey Joe Biden!
Hey Leaky Leahy!
Hey Teddy Kennedy!
Hey Hillary Rotham!
Hey Hanoi John Heinz-Kerry-Kohn-Kahn-Kon
Your own backyard needs cleaning up!
Hey! Hey! Hey!
We aren't spending enough on education.
Why all one has to do is ask a politician or a union official and they will tell you the same thing.
I used to believe that spending more always helped, however now I believe I'll have another beer, and before I go to bed I'll pea it away.
Tomorrow I think I'll drink tap water and save money and flushes.
I wish I could say the same for my tax burden tomorrow.
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