The Buncombe County school system already has early college, middle college, and other safety nets for helping those who don’t want to play by the rules graduate. They’ve got all kinds of programs to compensate for failure in the home. Look how insignificant attention to academics is on their web site. Since throwing money at the problem hasn’t helped, it only stands to reason that throwing teams at the situation will.

Why care about education when spelling and mathematics are clearly not important? The article announcing the team scheme sports two spelling errors. They weren’t caught by the spell checker because they are real words.

Worse, we are told that each year, Buncombe County Schools lose 5.38% of students. Minuscule.

BCS serves approximately 25,000 students. If 5.38% drop out, that means 23,655 graduate, right? Wrong. To get the correct numbers, one must look at each class individually. Consider the dropout factory as an assembly line where each year, for sake of simplification, 25,000/13 (for K-12) or 1923 students are plopped on the assembly line in a new kindergarten class, and 1923 would be expected to graduate if we have a tight quality control system. Instead, if 5.38% of 25,000 or 1345 students fall off the line before they are fully processed, we would have a 1345/1923 output-to-input ratio, or a 70% dropout rate. But far be it for educators to be precise in defining quantities.

In the last two years, BCS had 442 and 448 students drop out, giving a cohort dropout rate of around 23%, which conforms to reality. The 5.38% figure, I presume, is the 9th – 12th grade dropout rate. It is the ratio of the number of kids dropping out in one cohort to the number of kids in four cohorts. Clever.