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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.
© 2003
The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.
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