This week, school started again and a small army has been dispatched to tackle a crisis no one wants to talk about. They’ll be overwhelmed and outnumbered, like they are every year.
If they manage to raise Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ graduation numbers slightly, like they did last year, no one will want to talk about it, because that would require actually disclosing what the graduation rate is, and school officials absolutely, positively do not want you to know those numbers.
That’s probably why the school system dedicated only a quarter of a page in its annual district report to the small graph that contains them. But burying the problem won’t change the fact that at the end of the 2002-2003 school year, the latest for which numbers are available, 23 percent of the kids who started as high school freshmen four years before had dropped out of school.
When you look at this from a racial and economic perspective, the problem is even more staggering.
By the end of the school year, 33.2 percent of high school students on free and reduced lunch who started school four years before had dropped out. Thirty percent of African-American students dropped out, as did 15 percent of their white peers. Some 22 percent of the kids who fall into the racial category of “other” also didn’t make it.
Let’s be clear on this. These aren’t the kids who left the system to go elsewhere — those students are accounted for in CMS’s numbers. These are the kids who dropped out.
I can’t even begin to fathom what this will mean in the years to come for the city’s minority and African-American communities, much less the community as a whole. The cost of battling the poverty this will create is incalculable.
If you find these statistics shocking, and if you wonder why you haven’t heard about them before, it’s because an elaborate numbers game has been played on you. In February, CMS officials were more than happy to talk with our county’s main daily newspaper about how they had successfully cut the dropout rate in half since the late 1990s, to about 4.02 percent.
It’s the same screwy numbers system the state uses, one that would lead you to believe that 96 percent of kids graduate. But what no one wants to talk about — or, apparently, to report — is the fact that when you have a dropout rate of between four to five percent, it means that over 20 percent of freshmen who enter high school won’t graduate four years later.
In reality, CMS has a 54.2 percent graduation rate. (Of the freshmen who started four years before, 54 percent graduated, 17.9 percent left CMS, 5 percent remained active students but lacked the credits to graduate and 23 percent dropped out.) The statewide graduation rate average is 60 percent.
It’s true that things have gotten better since the year before, when 27 percent of CMS students who started school four years before dropped out. But my point is that this problem deserves more attention than a few inches in the school system’s annual 60-page report and the occasional misleading press release.
After all, it’s not like the system isn’t doing anything about this. A small army of full-time counselors and bureaucrats does nothing but battle this problem year in and year out.
This year, once again, over 70 dropout prevention staff members will work full time to keep kids from giving up. Maybe they’ll get somewhere and maybe they won’t, but either way, you probably won’t read or hear much about it, or at least not the real numbers, anywhere but here. And of course, as with every other problem the school board and school system leaders don’t want to acknowledge, much less deal with, poor children and minorities will pay the highest price.
But that’s not what’s important, as we all know. No, what’s important is that these kids have new seats and new desks in equitable new buildings during their short siesta with the school system. It’s important that things appear to be fair so that school board members look like they’ve got everything under control. Above all else, the goal is to create the perception that they are, in fact, in control.
So after this column comes out, some school board members will call me a few names and insinuate I got the story wrong despite the fact that I am using the system’s own numbers. Then, in the coming weeks, you will read about the near-glowing annual evaluation Schools Superintendent James Pughsley will get. You can expect to hear great things about him, particularly from the four school board members who, along with Pughsley, have presided over this mess for years.
Then they’ll all go back to arguing over when and where to build new schools as the kids they never really educated to begin with quietly drop like flies.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Aug 18-24, 2004.
