CLEVELAND CAN'T JUST WRITE OFF 5,000 KIDS A YEAR
by Phillip Morris
Cleveland, Ohio. October 28, 2003—Cleveland will never again be great as long as its high schools graduate fewer than 40 per cent of its children, as they did in the 2001-02 school year. Last year, 4,969 students dropped out of the Cleveland schools, according to the Ohio Department of Education. That's a mind-blowing number. These are students who might as well have signed up for stints in prisons and homeless shelters, or lives of abject poverty and underachievement.
A dropout ratio that high should be labeled for what it is - a catastrophe - and it should make Cleveland's primary challenge exceedingly clear: This city (we) must radically lower the number of ignorant youngsters roaming our streets and exempting themselves from our work force as they become permanent social liabilities.
City leaders can build all of the downtown housing they want and a convention center more attractive than anything found in Las Vegas or Orlando. But with so much ignorance emanating from the neighborhoods, with its associated pathologies, Cleveland cannot reasonably aspire to regain elite municipal status.
The city's challenge, first and foremost, is to understand why any fresh-faced adolescent deliberately chooses a life defined by poverty and despair, simply by failing to complete the minimal schooling needed to compete at a basic level in our complex society.
There is no obvious solution. We once knew why children - boys, especially - dropped out. But the pressures and the economic realities that birth a dropout have changed radically since our river routinely burned. The steel mills no longer beckon our young and unschooled with promises of a decent life. Companies like White Motors no longer hold forth a decent future for young men with weak literacy skills but strong backs.
So why do our children walk off into the darkness, without any hope, without any plan, without any reasonable prospect of a fulfilling future?
Earlier this year, I visited a dropout prevention counselor affiliated with Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry, who was assigned to East Technical High School. I expected to hear multiple stories of children who simply decided that there was a quicker way to make a dollar than to daily endure eight periods and a study hall.
I expected to hear stories about young teens who decided that the streets, the basketball court, their newborns, anything, was more appealing than textbooks and days full of small desks and chalkboards.
What I didn't expect to hear was the number of students dropping out - young girls, primarily - to take care of ailing or drug-addicted parents. What I didn't realize were the pressures brought to bear on 13- or 14-year-olds who were staying at home and providing child care in place of their working-poor mothers or chronically absent fathers.
What I didn't expect to hear were the stories of parents who had no idea that their children were on the verge of dropping out - parents who had no idea that, as soon as they dropped their kids off in front of the school, those kids would routinely walk through the building, out a side exit, and into the streets and the prospect of failed lives.
The Plain Dealer reported Monday that a higher percentage of Cleveland's public school children master reading and other subjects by the end of the fourth grade than students in some of the inner-ring suburbs. That suggests that these are smart, capable children, who are opting out of high school and out of a productive life because they've seen or experienced something that leads them to the false conclusion that school is a dead-end track.
Today and Thursday, the Federation for Community Planning (216-781-2944) will hold public forums on high school graduation rates. This is a conversation more important to the future of Cleveland and the region than the talk geared to making downtown more vibrant or Cleveland's national convention appeal more striking.
The city, its residents and their schools must all buy into the notion that 5,000 dropouts a year is intolerable. And we must all understand that we can play some role in reducing the chronic failure that anchors our city so firmly to mediocrity.
Morris is an associate editor of The Plain Dealer's editorial pages.
Contact Phillip Morris at:
pfmorris@plaind.com,
216-999-4070
Originally printed in The Plain Dealer.
(c) 2003
The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.