A Plan for Success: Communities of Color Define Policy Priorities for High School Reform
Communities across the United States share a common desire to see their children graduate from high school with a quality education that prepares them for college, the twenty-first-century workplace, and overall success in life. Yet far too often, some communities are torn apart by the tragic consequences of an unequal public education system that fails to provide high-quality education to students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods.
Nowhere is this crisis more acute than in our nation’s high schools. The problem is defined by several variables, including a growing number of schools that have inadequate human and material resources, large differences in student achievement, and unacceptable numbers of dropouts.
Why are there such blatant inequities in the distribution of education opportunities in America? One key problem is that many high-poverty schools, which predominately serve students of color, lack the funding and resources of wealthier schools and districts. A recent report noted that in thirty-one of forty-nine states studied, school districts with the highest minority enrollments received fewer resources than districts with the lowest number of minorities enrolled (Carey 2004). Another study determined that in schools where at least 75 percent of the students were low-income, there were three times as many uncertified or out-of-field teachers teaching English and science than there were in wealthier schools (Wirt et al. 2004).
Students of color and low-income students are also ill-served by low academic expectations, which often result in their disproportionate enrollment in less rigorous courses (Barth 2003). The challenges of fewer resources and lowered expectations serve as barriers for districts and schools that struggle to improve their students’ achievement to the levels of white students from more affluent areas. The consequences can be seen, for example, in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) statistics, which show that 86 percent of Hispanic and 89 percent of African American eighth graders read below grade level, compared to 63 percent of white eighth graders (U.S. Department of Education 2005). The consequences are also acute for English language learners (ELL): only 4 percent of eighth-grade ELL students reached the proficient or advanced NAEP reading levels in 2005 (U.S. Department of Education 2005).
Every school year, about 1.2 million students drop out of our nation’s high schools, leaving almost one of every three freshmen without a high school degree four years later (Swanson 2004). While roughly 70 percent of high school students graduate on time, African American, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native students have only a 55 percent or less chance of graduating from high school with a regular diploma (Greene and Winters 2006). In addition—and contrary to the model minority myth—many Asian Americans also face barriers in education. For example, about 50 percent of Cambodians and Laotians and about 60 percent of Hmong aged twenty-five and older who are living in the United States have less than a high school education (Reeves and Bennett 2004).
Research shows that about 2,000 of America’s 17,000 high schools produce approximately half of America’s dropouts (Balfanz and Legters 2004). In these schools—commonly called “dropout factories”—less than 60 percent of ninth graders are enrolled as twelfth graders four years later. The nation’s students of color are four times more likely than the nation’s nonminority students to attend one of these low-performing schools, and three times less likely to attend a high school with very high graduation rates. With the growth of the nonwhite population expected to outpace overall population growth in coming years, a steadily rising percentage of Americans will be without high school diplomas if this situation is not effectively addressed.
Dropouts are more likely than high school graduates to experience poverty, poor health, and incarceration during their adult lives. And the high cost of dropping out is borne not only by the individual but by all Americans, who pay an economic and social price when students leave high school without a diploma. If minority high school graduation rates were raised to the current level of whites by 2020, and if those new graduates went on to postsecondary education at similar rates, the potential increase in personal income across the country would add, conservatively, more than $310.4 billion to the U.S. economy (Alliance for Excellent Education 2006a).
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