Obama's Homework: Lower High School Dropout Rates

The newest component in President Obama's fight against American poverty? A "get-tough" plan to revitalize America's worst-performing schools. If the president's plan is approved by Congress, $900 million of the 2011 federal budget will be distributed as grants to the country's 2,000 high schools with the highest student dropout rates.

Leaving high school without a diploma sets students on the path to poverty. A high school dropout can expect to earn between $400,000 and $500,000 less over the course of his lifetime than his peers who do finish high school. Changemaker Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, writes that students who don't finish high school "represent a colossal loss to our communities and nation," facing disproportionately high rates of joblessness, incarceration, and poor physical and mental health. As a 2004 John Hopkins report on the the dropout crisis lamented, "The only real and lasting pipeline out of poverty in modern America, a solid high school education followed by post secondary schooling or training, is cracked and broken."

The fiscal impacts of America's high dropout rates is astonishing on a society-wide level as well. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies, a high school graduate generates, on average, "a positive lifetime net fiscal contribution of $287,000." The average high school dropout? Negative $5,200. Because of their "lower tax revenues, higher cash and in-kind transfer costs, and imposed incarceration costs," each high school dropout costs taxpayers $292,000.

It's no surprise that our nation's lowest-performing schools and highest dropout rates are found in America's poorest communities. Violence, unstable housing and work conditions, unhealthy diets -- all of these aspects of poverty can and do impact the likelihood that a student will not graduate from high school.

Ending the dropout crisis is good for individuals and good for society. However, whether President Obama is taking the right approach in doing so -- supporting mass layoffs of principals and faculty, restructuring campuses, and potentially shutting down entire schools altogether -- remains to be seen.

Photo credit: Kenneth Hynek