The Economic Truth Behind High School Drop-outs
By Victor Landa, NewsTaco
A new study published by the Urban Institute is challenging the conventional thinking about high school drop-outs. In fact, it put’s both liberal and conservative attitudes under a new light.
The study, titled “Dropping Out and Clocking In,” found that “a large proportion of high-school aged young people had left school early without their diploma and were working instead.” In other words, a big chunk of drop-outs leave school because they have to, to find jobs and contribute to their family’s well-being.
The UI put together a great graphic video that explains their findings:
A key finding is that a disproportionately large number of drop-outs who go to work instead of going to school are Latino and first generation immigrants. This runs contrary to long-held beliefs: that Latino drop-outs are lazy, lack intelligence, and don’t have a culture that instills the importance of education.
The liberal answer to the drop-out problem has been paternalistic, “let me tell you how we’re going to make this better.”
Conservatives have been condescending, “get off welfare, pull yourself up, get back to school and stop taking.”
This is important to note: the study found that 1/3 of drop-out kids contribute 20 percent of their family’s income, and the money, in 42 percent of cases, keeps the family above the poverty line. Yet, only 17 percent of the families receive Social Security or TANF benefits, 23 percent receive food stamps and less than 1/2 are covered by public health insurance.
Children who live in households in which parents have less than an 8th grade education are twice as likely to drop-out, and the drop-outs work in construction, food preparation, grounds cleaning and maintenance.
This is conversation-changing information. The drop-out problem is economic to a large extent, not social or cultural. What doesn’t change is that fact that the solution is, as it has been, political. Attitudes need to shift so that legislation can shift as well, and real solutions to ground-floor problems can be put in motion: living wages, expanded health care, innovative teaching practices that take families’ and communities’ economic situations into account. And it’s going to take a change in liberal and conservative attitudes towards poverty and immigrants, as well as listening to the people most affected by the drop-out cycle.
The Urban Institute report says it well:
We can’t keep thinking about drop-out prevention only in terms of academic enrichment and behavioral intervention. Economic problems have economic solutions, whether it’s experimenting with conditional cash transfers, offering deeper and wider non-cash benefits, or applying two-generation approaches that boost the earning capacity of parents and help ensure that youth employment supports ongoing education.
With stagnating wages for low-income people and a fraying federal safety net, more and more families may be facing difficult tradeoffs between investing in their children’s education and making ends meet.
[Photo by Gates Foundation/Flickr]
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