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Dropouts In America: Confronting The Graduation Rate Crisis

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This is not an accessible anthology of dropouts stating why they did it and what can be done for students younger than themselves. This is a compilation of education experts on the question of dropping out in the new millennium. Their big point is that in this huge (right-wing?) effort to promote standardized tests as the be-all-to-end-all, no one is asking if school pushes students out or students see the writing on the wall and voluntarily leave just so that schools can raise their passage rates.

The book does not mention "Race" in the title, and yet the first chapter is called "Minority Youth Left Out." The editor must have purposely put an African-American male on the cover as almost every chapter emphasizes, "Dropping-out is a problem, and it is disproportionately affecting males of color." Though placed in the education field, ethnic studies or African-American studies scholars may want to read it.

So much of this book focuses on statistical or numbers-crunching matters. Almost every author has to give the caution: "The numbers are inaccurate for X, Y, and Z reasons, but I must work with them because they are all we have." Besides curbing drop-out rates, I think these educators would like the government to fund better reporting of students' retention, expulsion, or dropping-out.

This book frustrates me in one huge way. Chapters have authoritative titles like "Who drops out?," "What can be done to curb the drop-out rate?," etc. However, in reading the chapters, you get no definitive answers. You learn that X group is more likely to drop out than Y group, but there's no reason to think an individual from group X will drop out or that an individual from Y group will graduate. This book never says, "Here are ten things that would curb the drop-out rate by at least 20%." If I were a principal or educator, this would not give me much direction about what I can do to address this problem.

This anthology is a needed work, but I fear that it doesn't offer enough answers for those who want to champion this cause.