This is the second diary on America's apathy about poverty, race and our high school dropout rates. Yesterday we covered the dimensions of the problem in various parts of the country in "Apathetic Americans abandons its youth."
Tonight’s diary is a reflection on invisible poverty drawn from my own life experience, and then a brief presentation of the facts about poverty and racial aspects of the school dropout travesty. How such a major problem can so be ignored amazes me. Do you, for instance, know how many black male prisoners are dropouts? Do you think that might have some effect on our economy and well-being as a nation?
Poverty. Race. Education. Tied together. Swept under the rug of intentionally misleading statistics with the big broom of apathy.
Gorette’s diary:
Don’t know about you, but I grew up middle class in a large family in a big city. Things were very tight and we didn’t have much. But my frugal parents somehow scrimped enough to take us on vacations out West. We had almost enough and we were not greedy. At my school, which was all white there were just a couple of kids who were regarded as “poor.” Other than that I knew nothing as a child or teenager of how people lived in poverty, what the conditions were and how society dealt with it, if at all, aside from what little I would see on television.
When I finally had a car, after I was married, I insisted my husband and I take a drive to the East Side of Cleveland, to see what were always referred to as “the slums.” This area was home to most of the city's black population, and I had not heard just how dreary and awful it was. I was appalled, stunned at how bad it was. Street after street of tenements, unrelenting, dilapidated old row houses, streets barren of trees or lawn. In their darkness they imparted a palpable feeling of despair. It was in the air. Although I had seen poor areas of the West Side inner city, it did not prepare me in the least for what I saw on that drive. This dismal and Dickensian place would have stifled my optimism and cheer. How could anyone living there ever have a glimmer of hope? How can they stand it? Since I moved from Ohio then, I’ve never been back. I wonder now how many people ever make that one trip.
Growing up I somehow became the civil rights activist within my family. Perhaps I identified with those little girls trying to go to a good school and meeting jeers and police and mean faces. They had courage. Being the activist within my family meant I had extremely strong feelings about the situation blacks faced in the south, and the de-segregation and civil rights movement sweeping over the country. But more than anything it meant I would experience many bitter arguments with my “prejudiced” father about it all. He had a heart and was good to the African Americans he supervised with others where he worked in the flats. He taught them how to write their names but because they had very little education he did not think they had equal intellectual abilities. This changed as he grew older. But because of a family situation I won’t go into, he had a very firm attitude that made him racist. Lots of people in Cleveland, and elsewhere, still are. My Dad’s been gone a long time and we never talked about it after one especially harsh blowup when I was about 17. He was not easy to talk to in the best of circumstances.
Those experiences and the fact that the schools I went to in Cleveland were all outstanding by any measure, and I was a teacher for a short while, are my background in this area. Oh, and I love learning and believe it is one of the most sublime of all endeavors. Good teachers fostered that in me.
One more anecdote: Ten years after graduating from John Marshall High School, I returned to that school as a substitute teacher, a day I shall forever rue. The school was practically unrecognizable. What had been a model of order and discipline, respect and good vibes was now the opposite. I was in shock, a fact that one tenth grade class took advantage of by locking me out of the classroom when I had to step into the hall for a moment! So I have seen how things can change in a school. The teachers had seemed to lose hope and to no longer care, but that is an overgeneralization.
Poverty. Race. Education. Tied together. Swept under the rug of intentionally misleading statistics with the big broom of apathy.
“Children are our future,” it has long been said.
But today we do not think about the future even in that abstract way. We live in the present. “What’s happening.” Now is our focus. Future citizens, the workers who will fund the social security for their parent’s generation are opting out of high school in droves.
Fully one-third of students who enter the ninth grade will not get a high school diploma and will earn far less during their lifetimes than those who finish, even if they get a GED eventually.
Poverty and race are central factors. Major studies done recently that have exposed the sham of dropout figures calculated variously by states for decades in ways that have vastly under-represented the true figures. http://www.eddigest.com/...Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis Gary Orfield, editor:
Every year, across the United States, a dangerously high percentage of students—mostly poor and minority—disappear from the educational pipeline before graduating from high school. Nationally, only about two-thirds of all students—and only half of all blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans—who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas four years later. For minority males, these figures are far lower.
Dropping out often leads to economic and social tragedy. High school dropouts are far more likely than graduates to be unemployed, in prison, unmarried or divorced, and living in poverty. A 2002 U.S. Census Bureau report….shows that the mean earnings of young adult Latinos who finish high school are 43 percent higher than those of Latinos who drop out.
A 2003 study based on U.S. Justice Department data reports that two-thirds of prison inmates are dropouts, and that an incredible 52 percent of all African American male dropouts in their early thirties have prison records. A 2003 report on the Chicago job market shows that more than half of young adult male African American dropouts in that city have no jobs at all. More and more of our future workers are from racial and ethnic groups whose young people are having severe difficulty finishing high school.
When students begin to have the problems that are strongly predictive of dropping out, no one does anything. Often no one even notices. In the worst cases, these students are encouraged to leave. No one cares enough to make an honest report on how many students are lost, how many lives are ruined.
American prejudice, lack of information and reluctance to look at the situation have allowed the situation to remain an almost taboo problem, along with illiteracy. What happens when we do this? Our future becomes less secure and impoverished economically and socially. What these people could contribute to society is lost.
http://www.timesrecord.com/... ….. Craig Larrabee, president of Jobs for Maine Graduates (JMG), provides 2500 students from scores of schools across the state with alternative learning programs. The students are at risk of becoming dropouts due to lack of support, learning problems and/or poverty, but this program achieves a 96% graduation rate.
Without that extra push, young people can end up in yet another disadvantaged category, "idle youth." Larrabee said 18 percent of the state's 18- to 24-year-olds were not working or in school in 2004. "That's one in five not being a productive citizen, not paying taxes or getting an education," he said. "We have to look at the impact of losing these kids and what will it mean to our economy."
http://64.233.167.104/...
“Burdens of our poorest community schools.” The poorest schools have some of the following common characteristics: Poor physical facility and overcrowding, unsafe conditions, poorly qualified or inexperienced staff, poor material resources, poor curriculum and an intentional lack of parental involvement.
Lack of Education Affecting Health of San Antonians ….Vickie Jean Summershttp://www.woai.com/.... Lists several factors desperately needing attention because of their impact on health: poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and no health insurance. “They say to fight the negative trend, more education is needed. If we don't do something on addressing the needs of the uninsured populations that are going to increase in numbers, we're probably going to see a greater number of any number of diseases that could have been prevented,” said Dr. Fernando Guerra.
How long can education in America continue to fail before the nation suffers irremediably? Current dropout levels are about 30%, with a higher rate among blacks. This creates a permanent "underclass" that is antithetical to the American creed. It is leaving that 30% behind without the opportunities on which we pride ourselves.
Democrats need to show they have real solutions to real problems in America including those of poverty and education, problems everyone has become so good at ignoring.
There will be at least one more diary on this subject because I had to cut a lot from this one--it was so long! There is a good section on the Gates foundation education efforts and another about the political climate, i.e. how the GOP has decreased funding for programs benefiting the poor while raising the numbers of those in poverty.