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May 19, 2005
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University (CRP)
hosted a conference in Atlanta on Thursday, May 19,2005
entitled: “Dropouts in the South: Confronting
the Graduation Rate Crisis.” The conference took
place in the Auditorium at the Cosby Academic Center at Spelman
College, 350 Spelman Lane. It was co-sponsored by 12 organizations,
and is being supported by a generous grant from the Charles
Stewart Mott Foundation.
This conference addressed an urgent social issue that
has, until recently, been largely invisible: the alarming numbers
of students—disproportionately poor and minority—who
either drop out, or leave high school without a diploma, yet are
unaccounted for. According to a study released by The Civil Rights
Project at Harvard University (CRP) and the Urban
Institute last year, only 68% of the nation’s students
graduated on-time from high school with regular diplomas in 2001.
For minority students, the news is worse; only 50% of Blacks, 51%
of Native Americans, and 53% of Latinos graduated alongside their
peers that year.
Moreover, many southern states have the lowest on-time
graduation rates in the country; with less than half of their minority
students completing high school on-time with regular diplomas. At
a time when the National Governor’s Association has set lowering
the dropout rate as one of its highest priorities, this conference
will generate ideas both for obtaining more accurate data at the
state and local level and for raising graduation rates, especially
for students attending “dropout factories” where less
than half the 9th graders graduate four years later.
For minority students, the news is worse. Only 55
percent of African American students, and 57 percent of Latino students,
graduate on-time with regular diplomas. The figures are even lower
for male students in these groups. Research suggests that pressures
to raise test scores, racial isolation, and inadequate resources
may be contributing to this crisis. Many urban high schools with
large minority student populations have become “dropout factories”
which graduate less than half of their ninth graders four years
later.
The social consequences of this crisis are devastating.
The nation loses millions of dollars each year in revenue and taxes
because of the high numbers of unemployed and underemployed dropouts.
High school dropouts are swelling our nation’s overcrowded
prisons, where 68% of inmates have not completed high school. Communities
with large numbers of high school dropouts experience overwhelming
problems of poverty, incarceration, unemployment, drug abuse and
addiction, and intergenerational dependency.
This was an interactive event, with significant portions
of the day devoted to audience participation and discussion. We
used CRP’s new book entitled: Dropouts in America: Confronting
the Graduation Rate Crisis as the framework for presentations and
discussions that will: (1) provide the most recent estimates of
high school graduation rates in nine Southern states—Georgia,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia—disaggregated by race, national
origin and gender; (2) review the most accurate methods for estimating
graduation rates; (3) discuss solutions, promising interventions
and models for reducing dropout rates at the school, district, and
state levels; and (4) discuss how state and federal educational
accountability systems could be retooled to provide more meaningful
incentives for school officials to increase graduation rates. We
will also include a panel discussion of the “school to prison
pipeline” that examines how school disciplinary policies may
accelerate the flow of students out of school and into the criminal
justice system. A similar event last month focusing on graduation
rates in California produced scores of articles, legislative proposals,
and a new dropout policy by the Los Angeles School Board.
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