We can end dropouts right now

 We can end dropouts right now

 

All men are not created equally.  And neither are students.  So why is it that we insist on pushing every child through the same knot holes in order to get a high school diploma?

Baltimore City has been working very hard to get students  who have dropped out during the pandemic and the virtual not instruction to return to school.   It is sending folks to homes and to student workplaces trying to convince them it is worth their time and energy to come back to school.

But is it really?   What will they get in high school that will change their lives besides a high school diploma.   For a teenager, a high school diploma is in never never land and now they can get $15 an hour in the service sector and that looks like big time earning.

If they return to school, they can get algebra 1, Shakespeare, and another foreign language.  What exactly are they going to do with that?  How will that make their lives better?

We talk a good game about college and career readiness.  In reality all we are preparing students for is college and there are lots of kids whose abilities and interests do not require college.

We need to drop many of the academic classes that we currently require kids to take.  Students need to learn to read and write grammatically correct English, would be good if they could speak it too.  They need some heavy coursework in financial literacy and civics so they can learn how the government is run and how to avoid being scammed by bad actors who want their money.  Current history would be valuable as well. Some science in how to manage and take care of the body that they live in.  Beyond that we need to start training kids for the jobs that are out there right now.   For some those jobs require college.  But for lots of other jobs, no college required.

Look around at the jobs that are going begging.  Georgia has an entire training program to prepare kids for the TV production industry.   Georgia is about to outpace California in that field.  Why, because they have skilled labor and they are preparing more and better skilled support staff for all of the theatre union performers.  

Maryland has huge vacancies in the construction trades and in commercial drivers.  We should be teaching students those skills and they might see some purpose in coming back to school.

We could eliminate dropouts in just a few years if we made school relevant to the students and to their interests and skill set instead of pandering to the politicians who are in white collar jobs that don’t require dirty hands.  Let’s take a giant step backwards to the olden days when there were academic (heading to college), commercial (heading to the business world) and vocational-technical (heading to skilled employment) diplomas.  More students finished high school because it was worth their time.