"American Graduate Week"

This week is apparently American Graduate Week, following up from the American Graduate Day Announcement

Unless graduation rates increase, nearly 12 million students will likely drop out over the next decade, resulting in a loss to the nation of $1.5 trillion in lost wages and increased social costs due to crime and healthcare. Among students who do graduate, one-third need remedial courses in college and far fewer will go on to earn a college degree. Yet, more than half of all new jobs in the next decade will require some postsecondary education.

As that phrasing suggests, the "crisis" is not an increase in dropout rates, but rather an increase in the need for the qualifications which graduation is an attempt to represent. Really we don't need high school graduates; we need adults whose education suffices for a life of production, consumption, creation, family, and citizenship. (Hm, is that all?) So we have an effort by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which the NYT reports as Public Broadcasting Takes Role in Improving Graduation Rates

While graduation rates have inched up in recent years, nearly 25 percent of students over all drop out.

And Ray Suarez of PBS imagines our current system as a mechanism for generating dropouts, a mechanism in need of sabotage; Call is Out to Sabotage the Dropout Crisis | PBS NewsHour

The National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights organization, helps run a charter school in Los Angeles? Who knew? A not-for-profit called BuildOn takes students who are on the verge of dropping out and gives them international service learning experiences, of the kind that has become commonplace for upper middle class kids, but is much less available to poor kids. Harlem RBI takes teens with school troubles, puts them on baseball and softball teams, and requires tutoring, workshops, and homework help to keep a player's average high enough to stay on the team.

The athletics approach is one I have to keep reminding myself about: it's not one that appealed to me as a kid. But it's not exactly a newfangled notion. In Plato's world,

Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to ...create a harmonious person.

And I think archery and riding went in there too, although I also think story-telling comes even earlier, in character formation. But anyway athletics is important, somewhere in there, even if it might be minimized for people like me. But then, as Plato also put it,

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

Fair enough. I suspect that somewhat greater attention to (and measurement of) what amuses kids' minds would do quite a bit towards raising graduation rates, and even the rate of achievement of any particular level of qualifications.

Or then again, maybe not.