So, with these changes in mind, what's happening with the black and Latino students who already account for more than a third of the public school population, and who should be expected to play an increasingly important role in shaping American society?
Not much that is good.
Unfortunately, the kids I've been talking about are white. I haven't even gotten to the Latino and black kids. They are in much worse shape than the white kids......esp. the Latino and black boys.......much, much worse if you can believe that.
One of the weirder things occurring in American education is the disappearance of kids — especially black and Hispanic kids — from high school. The San Antonio Express-News, reporting last March on a study by a local research association, said that "more than a third of Texas high school freshman students are disappearing from the system or otherwise failing to obtain a high school diploma in four years."
Its starts in the 8th grade...they think that's when gangs make their inroads. In your hometown of Chicago, 80% of black boys drop up by the time they get to high school. 80%! We are going backwards in our educational system.
The Los Angeles Times, for a feature article that same month, interviewed a 17-year-old named Nancy Meza who had quickly made friends with dozens of classmates when she arrived at the Boyle Heights campus of Roosevelt High School. Four years later, as her senior class gathered for its graduation photo, only four of her friends were there. Nearly all of the others had dropped out.
"It really struck me today," said Nancy. "All of my friends are gone."
Very, very sad........and she's a girl. Many of the friends of Latino boys are dead from homicide or in prison by the time they graduate from high school.
This is an underrecognized, underreported crisis in American life. Far from preparing kids for college, big-city high schools in neighborhoods with large numbers of poor, black and Latino youngsters are just hemorrhaging students. The kids are vanishing into a wilderness of ignorance. If the dropout rate were somehow reversed in a city like Los Angeles, there wouldn't be enough schools to accommodate the kids.
"The high dropout rate has been built into the regular order of school facilities in our big cities," said Professor Orfield. "They expect that the classes will just shrivel as the kids go through the grades."
It seems America's decline has been underway for a while.
These kids will not be part of the cadre of new leadership for America in the 21st century. They will have a hard enough time just surviving.
And how can America be in the cadre of leadership countries if so many of us are undereducated. When we need the very best to be leading us, we instead get the very worse.
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