Educators, politicians, and MTV take aim at US dropout 'epidemic'

A national summit in Washington addresses the issue, hoping to get more students to graduate.

from the May 9, 2007 edition

MTV winner: Jynell Harrison of Providence, R.I., graduated high school in 2005. She won a $10,000 scholarship from MTV recently for an essay she wrote about not dropping out of high school.

Melanie Stetson Freeman – Staff

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With her grandmother correcting her grammar every step of the way, Jynell Harrison made it to high school graduation in 2005. It wasn't easy being surrounded by "a lot of kids that didn't really care about education" and teachers who "get fed up with kids not paying attention, and kind of lose interest," she says in a phone interview. Nearly half the students in her district, Providence, R.I., don't graduate high school within four years.

Now making gelato for a living and paying rent to her mom, Ms. Harrison poured her ideas about education into an essay after hearing about a $10,000 college scholarship contest on MTV. She won, and on May 9 she'll speak in front of hundreds of educators, policymakers, and peers at the National Summit to End America's Silent Dropout Epidemic. "I'm most looking forward to having my opinion mean something," she says.

The summit in Washington is carrying forward the momentum that's been building for the past few years in response to some sobering statistics: About 3 out of 10 American ninth-graders don't graduate with their class – with the ratio climbing to nearly half for African-Americans, Hispanics, and native Americans.

By combining student voices, examples of successful policies, and a new online tool for pinpointing graduation rates in every school district in the United States, it's meant to be an "action-forcing event," says John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises, the public policy group leading the summit. Cosponsors include the National Governors Association, MTV, Time magazine, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Two bipartisan bills were recently proposed in the US Congress that would authorize about $3 billion toward redu­cing dropout rates. A number of governors and local officials are also tackling the issue head-on as more people sound the alarm over the implications of a high dropout rate for America's future. "We've been asleep at the switch for a number of decades ... and now for the first time ... we're potentially on the cusp of really grabbing hold of this dropout issue and doing something meaningful about it," says Mr. Bridgeland, who co-wrote "The Silent Epidemic," a 2006 report on the perspectives of dropouts.

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