Do You Really Want to Lower the Dropout Rate?

by David Safier

While I was googling my way through education topics, I pulled up a 2007 cover story from Time Magazine, Dropout Nation. The article bemoans the high dropout rate, which it puts at somewhere between 20% and 33%.

Lowering the dropout rate is a wonderful idea. Everyone’s for it. We want an educated citizenry. The day of good wages for jobs that don’t demand an education are long gone.

But have people thought through what would happen if we kept all those reluctant students in school until they graduate?

This is an important topic I plan to return to in the future, because the discussion gets to the heart of the potential greatness of the U.S. public school system (You heard me right. I said “greatness.”) as well as one of its central sources of difficulties.

If we lower the dropout rate, here are some of the likely consequences:

  • We’ll have to spend more money for education, because we’ll have more students in school.
  • Each potential dropout we bring back into the system will cost us more than the other students. Most of them will need more counseling; they’ll keep the attendance staff busy; they’ll need a squad of truant officers to track them down and bring them to school; they’ll require more academic attention in the form of tutors and maybe smaller classes.
  • Behavior problems will increase, since many of today’s dropouts were yesterday’s troublemakers.
  • The schools’ average standardized test scores will drop, since many of the people we’re bringing back combine low skills with low motivation, so they’ll be near the bottom on their test performances.
  • More students will graduate high school with little knowledge and low skills.

Every time we keep a student in the system who wants to leave, we create new headaches for our overburdened educational system and more distractions for the other students.

Is it worth creating new problems to lower the dropout rate? I’m going to let you decide for yourself. It’s an exceedingly complex question, and I’ve only scratched the surface here.

Here’s an interesting bit of information culled from U.S. Census data. In 1910, 14% of adults 25 and older had high school diplomas. In 1940, the number was up to 25%. In 1970, it was 55%. In 2005, it was 85%.

“Schools aren’t like they were when I was young,” you say? Right you are. All those kids causing trouble and not paying attention in today’s schools were somewhere else when you were in the classroom. If you want to get back to the good ol’ days, talk more students into dropping out so we have fewer ne’er-do-wells in our schools.

But if you really want to lower the dropout rate, expect all the problems in our schools to increase.

Note: I’m not suggesting we should increase the dropout rate, or even leave it where it is. I would love to see more students attending school and succeeding. But people need to understand that bringing reluctant students into the schools and keeping them there is a difficult, costly process. These students are the hardest to reach and the hardest to teach. They often come with socioeconomical, psychological and intellectual baggage that takes lots of time and tender loving care to get through. You don’t just give them a big hug when they reenter the schoolhouse and make everything better. Unless we have the will, and the financial resources, we won’t make much progress.