There are many things I don’t understand, but one of the most worrisome is the fact that so many kids do not graduate from high school! In 2009 only 69% of kids who started school 12 years earlier earned a high school diploma! That leaves more than a million kids without the basic skills needed to survive in our competitive world. I can’t imagine what keeps the 31% from graduating! For African America, Native American, and Hispanics the graduation rate is just over 50%; barely half! There is a nearly $10,000 annual earnings gap between high school graduates and dropouts. How are these kids going to avoid poverty or for those already impoverished, how will they climb out?
Dwight Lewis in his column yesterday, in the Tennessean, points out the relationship between school suspension and school drop out. Not surprisingly, the more a kid is suspended, the greater is the risk of not graduating.
As long as I’m confessing my lack of understanding, let me add that I have never been able to understand school suspension either. In my job interviewing and examining military candidates, we must ask them if they have ever been suspended from school; many of them have. The most common reason for suspension was fighting, with skipping school a close second. I am not an educator, but why would a school suspend someone for skipping? That’s like giving bank robbers money for attempting to rob banks. We, as a country, do not do that, at least not yet! And fighting; isn’t there a better way to deal with fights? Obviously suspension is not working!
Decades ago when I was a student in a very small school district in Minnesota, we got into fights, some of us even skipped school, but none of us was ever suspended, and we all graduated! Our principal, who was an iron ore worker in the summer, separated the fighters and warned he would call our parents if it happened again. Skipping school resulted in temporary exclusion from sports, band or other extracurricular activity, our principal, not his secretary, called our parents, and we were given several hours of after school detention, which he supervised. One skipping was enough for most of us.
Would someone please tell me what is going on?