Nation's Educators Sound the Alarm on School Dropout Crisis

Great Public Schools: A Basic Right, Our Responsibility

Great public schools are a basic right for every child in the United States. However, up to 30 percent of high school students give up this right and drop out of school before graduation. Why? Who is responsible for keeping at-risk students in school?

NEA and its 3.2 million members know that ensuring a great public school for every child is the shared responsibility of parents, families, educators, businesses, communities, and policymakers. In an effort to refocus our nation on the student dropout crisis, NEA leaders have released a 12-point plan to help reduce the high school dropout rate and ultimately eliminate the problem.

Everyone benefits from great public schools—from educating and preparing the next generation of students for the changes and challenges of the future to strengthening property values and communities. When a student drops out of school, we all pay. The dropout rate has serious economic, societal, and political effects on our nation.

The Effects of High Dropout Rates

Economic Effects:The costs of inadequate education are staggering in terms of economic losses to the nation.

• The United States could recoup nearly $200 billion a year in economic losses and secure its place as the world's future economic and educational leader by raising the quality of schooling, investing more money and other resources in education, and thereby lowering dropout rates.
  
  
• A high school dropout earns about $260,000 less over his or her lifetime than a high school graduate and pays about $60,000 less in taxes.
  
  
• Annual losses exceed $50 billion in federal and state income taxes for all 23 million of the nation's high school dropouts ages 18 to 67.
  
  
• The United States loses $192 billion—1.6 percent of its current gross domestic product in
  combined income and tax-revenue losses with each cohort of 18-year-olds who never complete high school. Increasing the educational attainment of that cohort by one year would recoup nearly half those losses. (Campaign for Education Equity, Teachers College, 2005) Retrieved from http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=5343
  

Societal Effects:  Youth who drop out are more likely to experience negative outcomes such as unemployment, underemployment, or incarceration.

• High school dropouts are 72 percent more likely to be unemployed compared to high school graduates. (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003)
  
  
• Nearly 80 percent of individuals in prison do not have a high school diploma. (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995)
  
  
• According to the National Longitudinal Transition Study of special education students, the arrest rates of youth with disabilities who dropped out were significantly higher than those who had graduated. (Wagner et al., 1991)
  
  
• A survey by the Department of Justice in the early 1990s estimated that a Black male born in 1991 stood a 28 percent chance of going to prison; an update in 2003 put the odds at 33 percent. (Black, 2005) Retrieved from www.asbj.com/2005/09/0905research.html
  Dropout rates are highest among youth from low-income families. (NCES2004)
  

Political Effects: Those who drop out are more likely to sit on the sidelines of democracy.

• College graduates are three times more likely to vote than Americans without a high school degree.(Goldstein, 2006) Retrieved from  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/18/AR2006091801118.html
  
  
• Those who earn more are far more likely to be affiliated with a political organization. With whites continuing to graduate high school and earn more than Blacks and Hispanics, it is clear that minorities are foreclosed from an equal political voice. (Campaign for Education Equity, Teachers College, 2005) Retrieved from http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=5320
  
  
• Hispanics, the nation's fastest growing population, have the highest dropout rate as an ethnic-minority group, twice the rate of Black, non-Hispanic students and more than three times the dropout rates of white, non-Hispanic students. (NCES, 2006)