Study: Low graduation rates in South represent ‘civil rights crisis’
The study conducted by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project and the Urban Institute found that only 64.5 percent of Southern high school students graduated with their classmates after four years — nearly 5 percentage points below the national average. That on-time graduation rate for Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the region’s population, was just 56.3 percent, one point higher than for blacks.
“The numbers that I’ve seen over the years are stressing and depressing,” said Mark Musick, president of the Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta.
The numbers were most stark in Georgia, where 47.4 percent of blacks, 42.4 percent of Hispanics and 32.7 percent of American Indians graduated on time. In Florida, the graduation rate for black males was just 38.3 percent.
“Those are horrible graduation rates,” said Dan Losen, senior education law and policy associate at the Harvard project. “We wouldn’t accept anything that low if we were looking at test scores. I mean, 50 percent is failing by most calculations. And low 60s is a D-minus.”
While Congress inserted graduation accountability provisions into the No Child Left Behind Act, the researchers found that lax enforcement on the state and federal levels “has rendered this requirement virtually useless.” So while a district like North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg County has until 2014 to reach 100 percent proficiency in math and reading, Losen says it has more than 325 years to achieve the goal of 90 percent graduation.
Chris Swanson, a senior research associate in the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center, found that lower graduation rates tend to occur in school districts with higher levels of racial segregation.
The researchers also noted that failure to graduate triples one’s chances of going to jail, and that spending on jails and prisons in every Southern state had far outstripped education spending in the past 20 years.
According to researcher Russell Rumberger, the 114,382 students who were officially reported as dropouts in 2002-03 from just five highlighted states — Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina — will cost those states $29.7 billion in lost wages.
Rumberger, a professor of education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said the increased incarceration cost for the state of Georgia alone is $105 million.
Officially, each of these states reported much lower dropout rates, generally pegged on the percentage of students who enter 12th grade at a particular school. This study used the Cumulative Promotion Index, which tracks students from the time they enter ninth grade.
“Because of misleading and inaccurate reporting of dropout and graduation rates, and an exclusive preoccupation with testing data, the public remains largely unaware of this educational and civil rights crisis,” the study said.
Mark Pudlow, a spokesman for the Florida Education Association, said experts can quibble over how the numbers are calculated, but they can’t ignore the fact that there is a pernicious gap among ethnic groups.
“Too many students in Florida aren’t well served by the Florida schools and feel the need to try alternatives, whether it’s a GED or whether it’s just entering the work force,” he says.
Musick, of the regional education board, said that even though some states recognized these gaps years ago and have begun programs to get more students through high school, “we haven’t been able to move the ball very far down the field.”
The study was among several to be presented during a “Dropouts in the South” conference beginning Thursday at Atlanta’s Spelman College.
While the study had an overall regional number from 16 Southern states, the report focused on five: Florida, with a 57.4 percent graduation rate; Georgia, 57.6 percent; Louisiana, 66.4 percent; Mississippi, 60.7 percent; and North Carolina, 64.6 percent.