As I was doing my research for an article about our youth I came across a term that stopped me dead in my tracks.  It invoked such negative imagery that I immediately had to find out what this was all about and if it was even real.  He headline that struck me so mightily was “1 in 10 high schools are dropout factories”.  “Dropout factories”?  What kind of dysfunctional high school could exist where they are churning out dropouts like an automobile plant churns out cars.  Worse still, how could 1 out of every 10 high schools be labeled with such a negative term?

As I read the article, I found out that a dropout factory is a high school where at least 40% of the students don’t finish with a high school diploma.  Either they are “dropouts” or “washouts”, but in any case you are talking about a public educational facility where nearly half of the students who come in don’t come out.  Most of these dropout factories are located in inner city areas but they are not contained there.  Nearly every state in the union has a dropout factory and it was surprising to see that states like California and Florida have large majorities of these schools.  As I read on it was not surprising that many of the students at these dropout factories were African American or Latino and the dropout rate among those students was generally over 50% and in many cases 70% was not uncommon.  To think that we have schools where 50% to 70% of the African American youth are not graduating is a scenario that filled me with shock, but as I read on I saw that the nationwide average dropout rate for African American youth is around 50%.

So here is the African American public school scenario in a nutshell – in the average public school scenario 50% of black youth do not graduate.  In the worst case situations where a black child is in a dropout factory, the statistics show that on average 70% will not get a high school diploma.  For the 2 or 3 out of 10 that do, a very small percentage have completed the prerequisites to apply for college, much less get accepted.  If education is the key to success in America, our next generation of African American youth are failing – miserably.  

Although there are no concrete answers to the dropout phenomenon, there are some early indicators that shed some light on how to address the problem.  The aforementioned Johns Hopkins Study identified the following corollaries between high school dropouts and absences, suspensions and course failures prior to their withdrawal from high school.  The study showed that 77% of dropouts had failed one or more semester courses in the 9^th grade and 615 had missed more than 20 days of school in the year before they left school.

What we are churning out of these dropout factories is a generation of children with very limited opportunities for success.  Instead we are creating a generation of jobless, poverty-stricken citizens who will not contribute to the financial growth of America, but instead will rob it of its resources.  A January 2010 study by the Alliance for Education stated that cutting the national dropout rate in half would add 30,000 new jobs and add $5.3 billion of growth to the economy.   To characterize it another way - for each student who does not graduate from high school the government must bear  the financial burden via public health services, welfare, and other government assistance programs.  Factories that churn out non-graduates hurt the economy, which in turn hurts us all.

To read the original article I referred to in the opening of this piece, go to the USA Today dropout factories article.  To see an interactive map of the dropout facilities in the country by state and county, click this link.

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