Deadly school drop-out rates are triggered by violence

Big cities with biggest school failures rack up most murders

April 15, 2008

By Monroe Anderson

    Coleman Young, yet another colorful Detroit mayor, but from an earlier era, was asked back in the late 1970s, if he supported gun control.
    “Why should I disarm the good citizens of Detroit,” asked Mayor Young, whose wardrobe included a holster complete with a loaded gun as accessory, “when they are surrounded by hostile suburbs?”
    The late mayor got it half right. His city was and still is surrounded by what might be considered hostile suburbs, but its citizens—both good and bad—should have been unconditionally disarmed.
    Three decades after Mayor Young’s refusal to establish gun control, Detroit maintains the dubious distinction of being one of America’s murder capitols. It’s also the nation’s high school drop out capitol—only one in four public school students actually are handed a diploma right after the valedictorian speech.
The Motor City is not alone when it comes to leaving its children behind.
      “Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in America’s largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss. Only about one-half (52 percent) of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma,” according to a study, Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytical Report on High School Graduation, released earlier this month by the America's Promise Alliance. “That rate is well below the national graduation rate of 70 percent, and even falls short of the average for urban districts across the country (60 percent).”
    Every 26 seconds, according to America’s Promise Alliance, one student drops out of high school.
    To translate that information from percentages and time to other numbers adds up to this: each year a million students fail to leave our nation’s high schools in urban areas with a diploma in hand.

    "While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trade rounds in the state of Killadelphia on who is bitter and who is not, the more important issues that should be discussed and debated remain a mere dismal backdrop."

     The vast majority who exit are students of color. Nearly half of all African American and Native American students won’t graduate with their class. Hispanics, with a 60 percent graduation rate, fare only slightly better. Almost all these former high schools will pay dearly by ending up in prison or on the welfare rolls.

    The dropout rate of more than a million students each year "is not just a crisis; this is a catastrophe," said former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the founding chairman of America's Promise Alliance, the organization that presented the research, examining graduation statistics from the 2003-04 school year.  The study also found a 17-point graduation gap between urban and suburban students in those metropolitan areas of the 50 largest cities. I’ll let you guess which students were more likely to end up in college.
    Which brings me back to the Motor City where, I believe, one catastrophe drives the other:  A high murder rate, fuels a low graduation rate. 

    The two have a perverse and tragic symbiotic connection. The top five cities with the lowest graduation rates all have murder rates well above the national average.    

    Detroit’s is more than five times greater. Indianapolis, with a graduation rate that’s not quite one in three, has a murder rate that’s twice the national average. Ohio’s two city’s Cleveland, which graduates a mere 34 percent of its high schoolers, and Columbus, which graduates just over four out of ten, have nearly twice the national murder rate.  Baltimore’s homicide rate is even greater than Detroit’s, and graduates about 35 percent of its high school students.

    While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trade rounds in the state of Killadelphia on who is bitter and who is not, the more important issues that should be discussed and debated remain a mere dismal backdrop. 
    Violence, of course, isn’t the only factor that’s jacking up the dropout rates, but it is a major culprit. And it doesn’t take a doctorate of philosophy degree to understand why big cities with high murder rates bear low graduation rolls. Kids are afraid to go to school. They fear for their lives. So even the good kids who want an education drop out because they don't want to get caught up in the violence—or get murdered.

    The choice between dropping out and death equals a lose-lose sum total. They may be skipping the possibility of real death only to suffer a virtual one. Without at least a high school diploma, theirs lives are all but over even before they begin.