Should I Stay or Should I Go?

• Author: Schmidt, Tracy J.
• Position: Dropping out of school - Louisiana, West Virginia - Statistical Data Included

Getting kids to stay in school is tough. But Louisiana thinks it has an idea that's working.

Representative Noble Ellington was out campaigning for a state Senate seat in his rural northeastern Louisiana district one fall day in 1996. He was walking door-to-door and getting reacquainted with his constituents. As he approached one house, he noticed several young men lifting weights in the carport. Realizing that they probably should have been in school, he sat down to talk to them and soon learned that they had dropped out of high school. Instead of attending classes, they were doing seasonal work for farmers and other types of short-term jobs.

Curious as to why they had left school, Ellington found out that they couldn't see any connection between going to school and their future employment. "My feeling is education should be more than just preparing some for college, but should expose all young people to other options out there," Ellington says.

"No Child Left Behind" is the current mantra in Washington, D.C., as the Bush administration's initiative begins to shape proposed federal policy. States like Louisiana have already added this concept to their education system. The United States loses the potential of approximately 524,000 youths who choose to drop out of school every year. This choice, according to statistics, can lead to a lifetime of low-paying jobs, a higher rate of incarceration and a greater chance for women becoming young, single mothers raising children in poverty. A study for one city estimated that a year's worth of dropouts cost $3.2 billion in lost earnings and more than $400 million in social services over a lifetime. But Senator Ellington wasn't only concerned about the economic impact of their choices, he was concerned about their future quality of life.

He won his Senate race. And he set out to pass legislation to help rectify a sad statistical fact of life in Louisiana--an 11.6 percent dropout rate, the highest of 37 states reporting and double the national average, according to the National Center on Education Statistics (1996-1997 data). The senator thought the traditional mindset of the education system in Louisiana had to change. No longer should the majority of energy and resources go to preparing a minority of students who were college-bound, leaving fewer resources and less attention to those students who struggled and sometimes gave up and dropped out of school. He believed that if all students were challenged by the same high standards and encouraged to think and plan ahead after graduation to go on to college or into...