Race and Graduation Rates
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
The problem with living in a culture so highly attuned to polls and surveys is that it tends to diminish the impact or skew the interpretation of certain statistics. After all, when you can identify down to 1/10 of a percent how the public feels about some rising starlet’s Oscar dress, it does risk trivializing the value of the survey. Worse still is the habit of reporting startling survey results as gospel without noting the many qualifications and limitations of the study in question. The end result is that we have grown to view such things as half entertainment, half questionable data source. (And there’s always someone ready to pop out and repeat the old saw about, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”)
Why does this concern me? Because in the media static that surrounds these trends, some truly upsetting facts get lost. Like drop-out rates for boys, especially African-American boys. I know I’ve written before about the problems with finding good data on gender and graduation rates–heck, just finding something reliable about drop-out rates in general can be tough. (There are all sorts of reasons for this, some of which are, of course, political. A high drop-out rate generally does not reflect well on one’s school or school district.) Fortunately, however, the Schott Foundation has just released data on education and boys–specifically, African-American boys. Some of the material is shocking–for example, the proportion of black boys in AP/Gifted classes is terribly low, while the number of black boys in special education classes or who are suspended or expelled is disproportionately high. And, needless to say, as bad as the drop-out situation is among boys as a whole, it can be even worse among black boys.
Granted, analyzing the data in the Schott report makes it clear that geography plays no small part in this calculus. Looking at some districts with a very small gap in graduation rates between black and white boys verus others where the gap rose as high as 38% begs all sorts of questions about the areas demographics, school systems, etc. I do wish, however, that the report had included information on girls’ graduation rates as well, since the picture would be even more complete if we could see how the boys (of any race) performed in relation to their female peers. This is not to make light of the challenges facing African-American boys, but because gender may be as much of an issue here as race.
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