Why the Graduation Crisis in our Cities Affects All Americans

Article here. Excerpt:

'As the United States battles several threats including an economic crisis and a possible public health pandemic, it’s important to remember that we are experiencing a “silent epidemic” that poses the greatest threat to our long-term economic strength and even our national security.

Today only about half (53%) of the young people in our nation’s 50 largest cities graduate from high school, and in the time it takes to read this, another U.S. teenager will have dropped out. In fact, 1.2 million students drop out annually. That’s 7,000 each school day, one every 26 seconds. The statistics are even more startling for students of color—less than half graduate on time.

We see the real depth of this disparity when we compare urban schools with their suburban counterparts. On average, suburban schools report graduation rates that are 18 percentage points higher.'

I posted the following comment; we'll see if it gets published:

"What the author is failing to mention is that the majority, and ever-more increasingly as time goes on, of the dropouts are boys (see: http://ftp.iza.org/dp3216.pdf, page 20 of the document, and figs XIV and XV on the last 2 pages of the .pdf file. That's just up through ~1985. It's gotten a lot worse since then.). What we're seeing is the creation of a huge underclass of men, while the graduation rate for women from colleges and universities is sitting firmly at 70% and the dropout rate for men from colleges is just over twice that of women (see http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/531ffoaa.asp ; here's the math: 58/42 = 0.724; 60/40 = 0.666; 0.724 - 0.666 = .058)

The future is not only not bright vis-a-vis education in general but also when speaking of society at large. The fastest way to cause a society to fall apart is to neglect the level of education that men have. Arguably it is the difference between maintaining civilization itself and watching it slip away. A world where most men you may come across are underemployed and undereducated is not a good world to be living in, and eventually not a very safe one; most men (and women, too) who commit violent crimes are un- or under-educated. This is not a mere statistical correlation."