By Shannon Holmes
March 20, 2006

Recently, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stated in a speech at the Leadership Forum on High School Dropouts that the high school drop out problem is “the new civil rights issue of our time.” The speech compared the efforts to desegregate the South, which began half a century ago to the current struggles concerning the performance of students in the Los Angeles schools, who are predominantly Latino. “These are numbers that should put a chill in your spine… We have numbers every bit as insidious as the National Guard blocking a school house door in Little Rock,” he said. Attending the Los Angeles meeting were over 300 community leaders, including several members of the city council and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) administrators.

The mayor has been campaigning to take over the LAUSD, but he insisted that his remarks were not “throwing stones” at the school system and its administrators. He went on to say, “There is a culture of complacency in the school district that has got to change.” The mayor claimed that more than 60 percent of Latinos and African Americans were failing to graduate. “Whatever the number is, we are in a crisis,” stated the mayor.

The purpose of the Leadership Forum was to develop a citywide multi-jurisdictional plan to reduce the number and percentage of high school dropouts and to increase the number of dropouts re-engaging educational and training institutions. One of the major issues that the mayor acknowledged in his remarks and one that is a national issue is the disagreement about how many students are leaving any school system and how best to calculate it.

The issue has been a major focus of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. A year ago, a study by the Civil Rights Project calculated that only 45 percent of students were graduating in four years from Los Angeles schools. The rate was even lower for Latino students, and much higher for white and Asian American students. African Americans were close to the districtwide average. LAUSD claims the dropout rate has declined to 24.6 percent for the 2004-2005 school year.

Another national drop out study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and released in March entitled The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts concluded after surveying dropouts in 25 local urban, suburban and rural areas across the country with high dropout rates that a majority thought they would have worked harder if their schools had higher expectations of them, and that the most common reason given for dropping out was that “classes were not interesting.”

A recent study with a metro Los Angeles focus which was commissioned by the Community Development Department, Workforce Investment Board and other agencies noted that one out of five Los Angeles and Long Beach youth, ages 16 to 24, are out of school and out of work. In Los Angeles this means 93,000 young people are not in school and have no job. It is also estimated that one year’s class of high school dropouts will cost California $38.5 billion in lost wages, taxes and productivity over their lifetimes. Also, economists have determined that people who lack a high school diploma earn $9,000 less per year than those who graduate high school.

LAUSD has proposed a series of changes designed to keep students in school several of which matched recommendations made by scholars at the forum. For instance, there is widespread agreement that schools and their faculty need to make more personal connections with students, keep better track of attendance, and do a better job of enlisting the help of parents and other adults to address this growing national crisis.