Dropout report paints hideous civil rights portrait

It’s time California’s educational system failure is recognized for what it is; a civil rights atrocity.

The California Department of Education ripped the blinders off of the horses parading down Main Street last week with the stunning announcement that 24.2 percent of the state’s 6.3 million high school students fails to reach the podium.

Los Angeles Unified School District’s dropout rate is worse with 33.6 percent of high school students failing to grab diplomas. Long Beach Unified School District, the main K-12 feeder system for Cal State Long Beach, fares comparatively with the statewide numbers at 24.6 percent.

Officials in both districts believe the numbers will be lower when final tallies are turned in on Aug. 28, according to reports in the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the Los Angeles Times. The latest dropout data is the result of a new tracking system that assigns students individual identification numbers that the state uses to follow them from door to door, or in this case, straight to the streets.

The 2006-07 data shows a state graduation rate of 67.6 percent, with another 8.2 percent falling into a group categorized as “completers.” Completers are students who don’t complete high school, but get either a GED or other certificate. The impact the figures have on minority students is most alarming, particularly the African-American and Latino youth who are being pushed in front of the school bus.

The percentage of black students dropping out statewide is 41.6, while Latino youngsters, who comprise nearly half of the state’s public school population, are missing diplomas at a daunting clip of 30.3 percent, according to the CDE’s declaration.

The report on white and Asian students, while still bleak, is a far cry from the astronomical percent of black and Latinos who don’t get a diploma or GED. White students are missing the mark by 15.2 percent and Asian students place at slightly above 10 percent. For years, the state’s school districts have been hiding their heads in the sand — or in a far less desirable location — with low, self-reported and self-serving figures that misled the public to believe the dropout dilemma hovered around 3 percent.

The state’s 2005-06 numbers placed the high school dropout rate at 13.9 percent, a number that in itself should have sent out more red flags than it did. Now that those figures have almost doubled, it’s time for a reality check.

The failing trend of minorities in U.S. schools is directly connected to a “resegregation” of public schools that began during the 1980s, according to a 2005 report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project at UCLA. A report titled “Why segregation matters: poverty and educational inequality” calls the combination of the No Child Left Behind Act and achievement testing, such as the California High School Exit Exam, contributors to a “soft racism of low expectations.”

The authors of the report, Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, claim linked variables like background, expectations, opportunity, treatment and concentrated poverty are proof of existing inequality in public school systems. The differences in success — or in this case, failure — rates cited above are undoubtedly attributable to unequal distribution of educational resources, notably in urban school districts where combinations of race and socioeconomic disparity are highly visible.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially issued an erasure of civil rights protection from the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling that outlawed “separate but equal” segregation in public schools. In its 2007 decision on Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the high court ruled that “voluntary integration does not advance a compelling interest, thus completely prohibiting the use of race in student assignments,” literally giving the nod to resegregation as an acceptable national policy.

But, as Orfield and Lee’s report more accurately states, “Segregated schools are unequal and there is very little evidence of any success in creating ‘separate but equal’ outcomes on a large scale.” By failing to provide quality education to minority high school students, California will deliver several unsavory results, including a future low-paid labor force, deeper strains on social services, higher crime rates and a racially-maligned prison population that compares to no other in the U.S.

The California Department of Education and state legislators need to treat this horrendous dropout predicament as the most important civil rights crisis of our times. A few steps that could significantly lower the state’s dropout figures are investing more in counseling for at-risk students, increasing parental involvement, more afterschool programs and realigning financial distribution so that segregation is not an oblique public policy.

Policy makers should revisit Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 speech at the Great March on Detroit, when he declared, “Segregation is wrong because it is a system of adultery perpetuated by an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.” The only redemption from the “illicit intercourse” is for those who allocate state educational funding to get their heads out of that less desirable location.