The news is full of scares of teachers having to be laid off for the state to balance its budget. The state now boasts a 73.1% average graduation rate. You can check your county’s successes here.
Swell. I graduated in a class of about 220, and I only know of one person who dropped out. At least now the state is not claiming to have a dropout rate of 1-3%. In former years, they divided the number of dropouts per year by the number of K-12 enrollees, making their number 1/13 of what it was. Nobody I asked at the DPI could explain why the streets were full of dropouts when the percentage was so low.
If I catch the drift of the article in the Asheville Citizen-Times correctly, I am like the brother of the Prodigal Son. More out-of-the-box* kids are graduating because they are getting intensive care and incentives to place them higher in the job market than the dorky geeks who get to school on time and complete their assignments. There seems to be a call to put more than 30 disciplined kids in normal classrooms and then create special programs and hire special staff for those who don’t want to play by the rules.
*In a less enlightened era, they were referred to as truants and delinquents.
