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Dropout report

Published Thursday, June 11, 2009 2:38 PM

By Neil Mellen
Summerville Journal Scene ®

Each day in South Carolina, 122 public high school students are lost.

That’s according to a new report on high school dropouts by Education Week magazine, entitled “Diplomas Count 2009.”

The nonpartisan report looked at how successfully public high schools in South Carolina and across the nation prepare students for college. The data was based on state reporting to the federal government for students in the freshmen class of 2005-06.

The study indicated than over one-in-three public school students in South Carolina failed to graduate on time. While 64,820 students were enrolled as freshmen in 2005-06, only 42,947 went on to graduate this spring.

“In the Class of ’09, 21,873 students failed to graduate this year,” explained Randy Page, President of South Carolinians for Responsible Government. “That’s tragic and calling it ‘acceptable’ or an ‘improvement’ is an insult to parents.”

In late May, South Carolina State Superintendent Jim Rex held a town hall meeting at Greenville’s J.L. Mann High School to discuss the dropout problem. He told audience members, “some areas and some districts are pulling the state averages down” and admitted to calling these troubled public schools “dropout factories.” Rex further explained that students attending these persistent failing schools “don’t have a shot at the American Dream.”

The 2009 Diplomas Count report authors also noted that South Carolina is one of the few states that fail to release detailed graduation information broken out in by gender, race, or school district.

The graduation figures in the Education Week publication, seen as a national standard for K12 education policy and assessment, vary greatly from higher numbers released by the South Carolina State Department of Education.

Neil Mellen is the Communications Director for South Carolinians for Responsible Government.

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are you a dropout, Neil?

Friday, June 12, 2009 12:57 PM

Because you're using selected information in a way that doesn't support your argument. (btw, that's "indicated that" and not "indicated than") You're also omitting the fact that our graduation rate has improved in South Carolina under Rex, and while national average actually declined during the same period. And you know why the state figures vary from the Education Week figures - Education Week uses a different group (8th graders), while the state uses data in the same way all other states do - it cites on-time graduation rates of entering high school freshmen. I really believe the goal of subsidizing private education is only to benefit the families who already have the money to use private schools. It won't benefit any lower income family (and 51.5 percent of our students live in poverty, according to the same report to which you refer). Just ask the state of Minnesota why it abandoned its subsidy program in just one year - the schools and their current students' families benefited, not the lower income folks that the program was supposed to help by offering better education options, and because those lower income children never got in to those private schools. This program is a sham, and only to abuse taxpayer money to support politicians' friends. South Carolinians aren't going to fall for it.

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