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Graduation rates in the Cleveland city schools have gone up substantially in recent years, but have just now reached 50%. A handful of other mainly urban Ohio school districts are also struggling to graduate their students. As part of our ongoing series Making Change: Building the Region's Future, ideastream's Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz reports on what dropping out does to kids' prospects, and their community's future.
According to Carol Rivchun, high school failure affects us all. Rivchun is president of Cleveland's Youth Opportunities Unlimited, which provides educational support and job training to teens who might-or already have-dropped out of high school. Prior to taking the helm at Y.O.U. six years ago, Rivchun was with COSE, the small business arm of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. She says effectively preparing kids for a rapidly changing workplace is vital - to educators, businesspeople, and the region as a whole. And that means helping them graduate high school or get their a GED.
And some employers are having trouble finding people with the skills they need, says Zach Schiller, research director of Policy Matters Ohio. Years ago across the region, he says, manufacturing jobs in particular provided a decent living to people without an education. But not only has the manufacturing sector shrunk significantly, Schiller says, its jobs have become more demanding.
Several years ago, Schiller authored a brief for Policy Matters Ohio about the earnings disparity between people who complete high school or get a GED, and those who don't. It's a wage gap that has widened substantially over the years. From 1979 to 2000, according to the report, non-high school grad earnings dropped by 1/3 - to $8 an hour from $11.98.
Lynita Edwards has a ready smile, a confident, easy manner, and a wide-open future - now. But a couple of years ago all she had was stress. She was raising two young children and dealing with the death of her father, all while trying to finish high school. Her education was derailed for a while, but she's since worked hard to get her GED.
Edwards now plans to go to college. She's not sure what she'll study, she says, but she's thinking about a career in television journalism - a fast-paced, competitive, demanding field. It's clear Edwards sees success as her first, last, and only option.
It's a good thing Edwards is interested in furthering her education, according to Bob Meyer, of the Work in Northeast Ohio Council. Employers, Meyer says, see high school completion as the barest minimum, though that's not exactly a secret. Still, kids in some districts continue to leave high school in droves. Some of Ohio's urban schools are barely graduating two-thirds of their students. Y.O.U.'s Carol Rivchun says kids leave school for all kinds of reasons - they're doing poorly, feeling unsafe, or need to financially support their families. But, she says, they find out quickly that dropping out doesn't improve anything, and often makes things worse.
Y.O.U. offers a computer-based GED training program that begins by assessing where students are academically, and then takes them step-by-step to where they need to go. The pace, Y.O.U. staff say, is set by students. Some finish in weeks; others take months. Before Y.O.U. or any program can work its magic, though, a person who has dropped out has to find a way back in. All too often they don't, and that increases their chances of being incarcerated, unemployed, and reliant on various social services - in all of those ways draining society's coffers. And, according to the National Dropout Prevention Center, each year's class of drop outs also costs the United States $200-billion-plus over a lifetime, in lower personal earnings and less taxes paid. In Cleveland, Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz, 90.3. Resources:
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