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Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Educating Vulnerable Pupils
VUE Number 12, Summer 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Changing the Landscape of Opportunity for Vulnerable Youth
By Lucretia Murphy
Lucretia Murphy is a senior project manager at Jobs for the Future.
> Author’s Biography
A national effort now being implemented in five cities demonstrates ways to provide
alternative pathways for students who are struggling or who have left school.
It doesn't take much to lose footing on a slippery slope.
Dionne lives, as she describes it, "in the ghetto" and attends what she calls a "ghetto school." There were "more kids in the hall than in the class." When she started high school, Dionne was one of the students in the class. By her sophomore year, she switched sides — "hanging out with my friends," first in the halls, then at home. She never dropped out; she said she just "stopped going to school." She returned for a few days, then stayed out because she knew she "was gonna fail anyway."
After a semester out of school, hanging out lost its allure. Her friends decided to return to school — an alternative school. Dionne joined them. "I remembered a goal I set myself: to be the first woman in my family to graduate from high school without having a baby." Driven by this goal, Dionne committed herself to the school's extended-day schedule, required after-school homework hours, and an internship. She didn't always like it, but the "teachers worked as hard as I did to get me to graduate." She graduated from high school and enrolled in college.
This pathway to a high school credential — slipping in and out of school — is not an uncommon story in high poverty minority communities where youth who graduate from high school on time beat the odds. But the faces missing from high school graduations across the country are not all Black and Brown, and the high schools losing youth are not all in the inner city. Approximately 30 percent of youth, nationally, do not graduate in the standard number of years (Greene 2001), many because of interruptions in their education. Across the country, there are a lot of Dionnes.
Like Dionne, many youth we consider to be dropouts do not label themselves that way; they have just "stopped going to school." Whatever their reason for leaving high school, they have not given up on their education. According to a recent Jobs for the Future report (Almeida, Johnson & Steinberg 2006), close to 60 percent of students who leave high school eventually earn a high school credential, mostly GEDs.
Unfortunately, this persistence does not pay long-term dividends for most of the youth. The pathways they follow to earning a high school credential do not adequately prepare them for the twenty-first-century economy. A GED is often not sufficient to secure a well-paying job. And only 10 percent of dropouts who earn a secondary credential and enroll in college obtain a degree. The challenge, then, is for communities to develop an education system that makes good on the promise of educational opportunity for all youth. (Almeida, Johnson & Steinberg 2006)
Archives
Educating Vulnerable Pupils
VUE Number 12, Summer 2006
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Changing the Landscape of Opportunity for Vulnerable Youth
By Lucretia Murphy
Lucretia Murphy is a senior project manager at Jobs for the Future.
> Author’s Biography
A national effort now being implemented in five cities demonstrates ways to provide
alternative pathways for students who are struggling or who have left school.
It doesn't take much to lose footing on a slippery slope.
Dionne lives, as she describes it, "in the ghetto" and attends what she calls a "ghetto school." There were "more kids in the hall than in the class." When she started high school, Dionne was one of the students in the class. By her sophomore year, she switched sides — "hanging out with my friends," first in the halls, then at home. She never dropped out; she said she just "stopped going to school." She returned for a few days, then stayed out because she knew she "was gonna fail anyway."
After a semester out of school, hanging out lost its allure. Her friends decided to return to school — an alternative school. Dionne joined them. "I remembered a goal I set myself: to be the first woman in my family to graduate from high school without having a baby." Driven by this goal, Dionne committed herself to the school's extended-day schedule, required after-school homework hours, and an internship. She didn't always like it, but the "teachers worked as hard as I did to get me to graduate." She graduated from high school and enrolled in college.
This pathway to a high school credential — slipping in and out of school — is not an uncommon story in high poverty minority communities where youth who graduate from high school on time beat the odds. But the faces missing from high school graduations across the country are not all Black and Brown, and the high schools losing youth are not all in the inner city. Approximately 30 percent of youth, nationally, do not graduate in the standard number of years (Greene 2001), many because of interruptions in their education. Across the country, there are a lot of Dionnes.
Like Dionne, many youth we consider to be dropouts do not label themselves that way; they have just "stopped going to school." Whatever their reason for leaving high school, they have not given up on their education. According to a recent Jobs for the Future report (Almeida, Johnson & Steinberg 2006), close to 60 percent of students who leave high school eventually earn a high school credential, mostly GEDs.
Unfortunately, this persistence does not pay long-term dividends for most of the youth. The pathways they follow to earning a high school credential do not adequately prepare them for the twenty-first-century economy. A GED is often not sufficient to secure a well-paying job. And only 10 percent of dropouts who earn a secondary credential and enroll in college obtain a degree. The challenge, then, is for communities to develop an education system that makes good on the promise of educational opportunity for all youth. (Almeida, Johnson & Steinberg 2006)
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