High schools in crisis

For decades, the truth was hidden. Misleading drop-out rates, often as low as 5 percent, were reported for years by schools and districts across the country. As a result, the scope of the crisis in our nation’s high schools was concealed from the public and policymakers. Only recently have those dropout rates — a fundamental indicator of how schools are performing — been rigorously scrutinized and the true extent of the epidemic revealed. Recent independent research reveals that well over a million, or about 30 percent, of the students who enter ninth grade each year have not graduated four years later.

In a world where 90 percent of the best-paying jobs require some post-secondary education, this nation cannot tolerate an educational system that allows approximately 7,000 students to drop out every single school day. Dropouts not only diminish their own chances of securing a good job and a promising future, but the communities in which they live also suffer. For instance, the roughly 1.2 million students who should have graduated with the class of 2007 will cost the nation $329 billion in lost income over the course of their lifetimes. Unfortunately, there is also a relationship between high school dropouts and prison — about two-thirds of all prisoners are high school dropouts. 

All parents want to see their children graduate with a quality education that prepares them for college and the modern workplace, and the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965 was designed to improve educational equity across communities to achieve that goal. But over the years the “S” in “ESEA” has been essentially forgotten. Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, our education system remains unequal and consistently fails to educate students of color and those from low-income neighborhoods. Nationally, about 70 percent of students graduate from high school, but only slightly more than half of black and Hispanic students earn diplomas. In some states the gap between white and minority graduation rates is as large as 50 percentage points.

Although almost every high school could do a better job in graduating at least some segment of its students, about 2,000 high schools produce more than half of the country’s dropouts. These schools, known as “dropout factories,” produce almost three-fourths of black dropouts and two-thirds of Hispanic dropouts.

For years, federal policy has focused on improving educational outcomes in the early grades, and indeed, success in elementary school — along with access to a high-quality early childhood education — is critically important to create a foundation on which all other learning can take place. However, these early years are just the first of many building blocks, and we must recognize that students need continuing support to succeed in the increasingly challenging environments of middle and high school. We know much more than we did five years ago, when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, about what needs to be done to improve secondary schools and outcomes for their students. Federal legislation — specifically the upcoming rewrite of NCLB — must reflect this knowledge.

We must have high expectations for every student and insist that our standards and assessments be aligned to the expectations of colleges and employers. We must ensure not only that graduation rates increase, but that earning a high school diploma is a meaningful accomplishment. We must use the indicators of student achievement and graduation to know which high schools are doing their job. Those that are not must be rehabilitated with targeted interventions, whole school reform, or replacement strategies.

Bills introduced this year, all of which we introduced or support, will be critical to reforming our ailing secondary schools. These include: the Graduation Promise Act, which targets funding at reforming dropout factories; the Every Student Counts Act, which holds schools accountable for a common, accurate graduation-rate formula; and the Success in the Middle Act, which creates targeted funds to turn around low-performing middle schools. We are pleased that elements of each are reflected in the draft reauthorization language of No Child Left Behind circulated by Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) and ranking member Buck McKeon (R-Calif.). We will encourage even more provisions to be incorporated before final legislation is passed by the House of Representatives, and we urge our colleagues to join us in providing the leadership needed to truly transform every high school into a place where all students graduate prepared for success in life.

Moving past the rhetoric of “no child left behind” so that we can include policies that make sure “every child graduates” must become a priority for Congress. Our students, and our nation, deserve and demand no less.

Scott and Hinojosa are members of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Wise is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia.

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