High School Dropout - A Crisis?

The Black Commentator - Cover Story: Blacks Pushed Down and Out - Issue 134

Only half of African American youth (50.2%) graduate with a diploma from high school – 42.8% of males and 56.2% of females, according to an Urban Institute study, Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth are being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis. The report, released in February in collaboration with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and other organizations, reveals a national education reality far bleaker than the rosy upper middle class landscape projected for decades by corporate media. Although Black dropout rates are certainly a precursor of social disaster, only 76.8% of Asian/Pacific Islanders, the highest graduating ethnic category, pick up their diplomas at the end of the 12th grade. Whites are roughly 2 points behind.

Thus, the national educational self-image, in which only marginalized groups drop out of high school, and where college is the norm, is false for all of America.