Every school day, 7000 kids drop out of school. Not graduating from high school costs the students and our economy as a whole. The average annual income for a high school dropout in 2009 was $19,540, while a high school graduate made on average $27,380 per year. ~ Info via Takepart.com
Citing a very insightful study by Harvard.edu titled Pathways to Prosperity :
“The problem is most visible in our high schools, which are plagued by extraordinarily high dropout rates. Every year, some one million students leave before earning a high school degree. Many drop out because they struggle academically. But large numbers say they dropped out because they felt their classes were not interesting, and that high school was unrelentingly boring. In other words, they didn’t believe high school was relevant, or providing a pathway to achieving their dreams. This crisis has been likened to a “silent epidemic” that is undermining the very future of America.”
And they offer some viable solutions:
“When it comes to teenagers, however, we Americans seem to think they will learn best by sitting all day in classrooms. If they have not mastered basic literacy and numeracy skills by the time they enter high school,the answer in many schools is to give them double blocks of English and math. Northern European educators, by contrast, believe that academic skills are best developed through embedding them in the presentation of complex workplace problems that students learn to solve in the course of their part-time schooling. These educators also focus on helping students understand underlying theory –not only how things work, but why.
This philosophy isn’t simply about learning: it’s also about how to enable young people to make a successful transition to working life. What is most striking about the best European vocational systems is the investment, social as well as financial,that society makes in supporting this transition. Employers and educators together see their role as not only developing the next generation of workers, but also as helping young people make the transition from adolescence to adulthood.”
What do you say?
Here’s an overview in an infographic by onlinecolleges.net:
