Education lost in translation

High school, the supposed best years of your life—carefree, full of fun, without the worries and responsibilities of the impending “real world”—are being wasted on today’s high school students. When an education is proving to be more and more important for securing a good-paying job, this fact and realization is somewhere being lost in translation or ignored.

On May 25, 2010, the Oregon Department of Education announced that only two out of three high school students in the class of 2009 graduated within four years. That calculates to 66 percent who graduated on time, 28 percent that dropped out, 4 percent who enrolled in the following fall, and the remaining 2 percent received a special-ed diploma.

This calculation, the Cohort Graduation Rate, is the first of its kind and performed a year ahead of federal requirements. It measures and keeps track of students who graduated with a regular diploma within four years. Before this calculation, Oregon relied on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) formula, which only took into account the number of students who graduated along with the drop-out rate of that year. The NCES graduation rate for the 2008–09 school year was a more accepting one of 85 percent, but not as reliable as the Cohort rating.

“As a state, this is not acceptable, absolutely not, and we have got to have a coordinated effort on this,” state superintendent, Susan Castillo, told The Oregonian recently. “Whether you have kids or not, this matters to you. When students are not getting the education they need, we all pay the price.”

Portland Public Schools had one of the lowest ratings in surrounding areas with a 53 percent graduation rate. And it is now known that the re-design is an effort to correcting this problem. Castillo’s goal is to make the district’s high schools into larger, equitable ones.

While it is wonderful that within its first year the Cohort Graduation Rating has made it known to educators that Oregon has a serious problem, some questions we are left with are what were the causes of the drop-out rate, why is there a need for a student to complete a fifth year, and what could have caused such a low graduation rate to begin with? Right now these questions are unknown and can only be hypothesized.

One thing is for sure: The matter at hand needs to be dealt with immediately. Oregon is the first state to put this new rating to the test, so a state-by-state comparison is non-existent. Once established, the Cohort Graduation Rate could find we have a nation-wide epidemic of low graduation rates. If that is the case, hopefully Oregon will have some solutions on solving the problem.

President Obama said it best in his Back to School event last September in Arlington, Va.: “No matter what you do in life—I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need an education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work and train for it and learn for it.”

Where the lost translation is being made, no one right now can pinpoint, but for the sake of the future, this problem needs correcting.