Drop out factories in AK
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| Mon, 09-08-2008 - 11:41am |
I started HS at Lathrop HS in Fairbanks, AK that was listed as a dropout factory in a DoE study published last year. I was only there for one semester, before moving back down to lower 48 and finishing my last 3.5 years at Fort Knox HS. Wasilla HS was also on the list, btw. This is not necessarily a bad mark against Palin. Hard to tell. These issues tend to be complicated. Will be interesting to go back and see what kind of emphasis she placed on education in her tenure as mayor and later governor.
I don't know what things are like now at Lathrop, but in my short experience there the teachers were pretty good; however, some of the students were amazingly nasty - and got away with a lot of bad behavior.
At the time I was there it seemed like the HS was huge to me. Don't know how many students we had, but it must have been well over 1K students. (Small by standards of high schools in VA.) We actually had an on campus pool in a separate building. Good facilities. Some kids road motorcycles to school in the late spring - and motorcyles and snow-mobiles in the winter (including the kid who had stolen my dad's motor cycle.) Drugs were a pretty big deal, too. I got a contact high on the bus home from people smoking pot on the bus. There were also lax rules at the time about visitors on campus. The neighbor lady came around and sold pot in the cafeteria. Weird stuff, but I've gotta believe their are procedures in place to stop the stuff now. Good facilities, good teachers, a few really nasty students and trespassers.
Anyway, one thing - the article I read mentioned that nearby Eielson was on the list and that its numbers were inflated because when the military families transferred out, they were counted as drop-outs. I wonder if they did the same thing with Lathrop, many of who students came, as I did, from the adjacent Ft. Wainwright. (That is, I'm wondering whether the numbers from Lathrop are artificially inflated.) Consider the average tour with family is about 3 years, with some extensions possible.
For example, we were supposed to move to Germany halfway through my senior year at fkhs, but army gave my dad an extension so I could finish. I'm guessing they'll only do that for seniors. You gotta figure a lot of kids starting HS at Lathrop are not going to be able to finish.

This is what I found :
Survey: high-school graduation rates are highest in West, Midwest - Washington Update
Mostly rural states in the West and Midwest have the highest percentage of residents with high-school diplomas, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released in December.
Wyoming leads the nation with 90.2 percent of residents 25 and older having graduated from high school, followed by Utah at 90.1 percent, according to a 2002 survey. Minnesota, Alaska and Nebraska were next, each with rates of at least 89 percent.
"This seems to be more related with minority composition and levels of immigration in these states than an urban-rural phenomenon," said Mark Mather, an analyst with the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based research group. Whites tend to be more educated than Blacks and Hispanics.
Mather said even urban areas in the top states typically had higher percentages of high-school graduates than urban areas in states like California, Texas and Alabama, which have large minority populations.
A key for rural areas of the Midwest is to reverse the "brain drain" phenomenon, in which younger, more educated people leave for jobs in cities, said Mark Drabenstott, director of the Center for the Study of Rural America, in Kansas City, Mo.
"It's certainly a very common pattern for the last 30 or 40 year," he said. "Farm kids from these states have gone to a university and never looked back."
Mississippi has the lowest rate of adults with high-school diplomas at 75 percent, more than 7 points below the U.S. average of 82.6 percent.
Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas and West Virginia had the next lowest rates. Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas are states with high minority populations, while Kentucky and West Virginia are in Appalachia, among the poorest regions in the country.
The data comes from the 2002 American Community Survey, which the government is testing as an annual replacement for the census "long form" sent out at the start of each decade.
Raleigh, N.C., had the highest percentage of high-school graduates (92 percent) among cities with 250,000 or more people, followed by Seattle with 91.1 percent.
Some top locations had major universities in or near the city, such as Minneapolis and Lexington-Fayette, Ky., while others were close to military installations, such as Colorado Springs, Colo., and Virginia Beach, Va.
With all the oil revenue, it's not surprising Alaska would continue to do well in overall graduation rates under Palin. (As I mentioned in my previous msg, I suspect the failure rate numbers may be misleading in the case of LHS, at least.) But she didn't just let things ride, she increased per pupil spending.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2008/08/nea_palin_is_pleasant_surprise.html
Surprisingly according to that article, she disagrees with McCain on vouchers and alternate certification for teachers. NEA adamantly opposes both of these policies. OTOH, I'm with McCain at least mildly on the 1st issue and very strongly on the second. Fiscally, I can understand her stance on vouchers. I hope someone pings her hard on the teacher cert issue though - would be nice to see this come up in debate. In particular it would be good to know whether and how they resolve their difference of opinions on this.
A few stats:
http://www.ppinys.org/reports/jtf/educationspending.htm
http://www.osba.org/lrelatns/salary/rankings.htm
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/profile.asp
These would, of course, be much more interesting if they were time series data.
I would love to know more of your thoughts on these issues.