Are High-Poverty Schools Educating the Poor to Remain so?

Each year, many of the 15 million students enrolled in public secondary schools ask the same question: What's the point of staying in school if the choices are a minimum-wage job upon graduation or a minimum-wage job now?

These students have astutely recognized a pitiful paradigm for far too many students enrolled in public education institutions.

"Education is the key to success," proclaims the marketing of myriad organizations, companies and institutions. Yet, even high school dropouts are smart enough to read between the lines. If "education" is the key to success, then thousands of public schools are not educating students, as many of them graduate with worthless diplomas and a marketing mantra that dissipates along with the music from Pomp and Circumstance.

Stark data from the Department of Education, which governs the education of 50 million students, exposes the reality of public education and contradicts the public relations promotion.

Over 16,000 public schools -- roughly 17 percent of all public schools -- are considered "high-poverty" educational institutions that service student bodies. What's more, 76 to 100 percent of these schools qualify for free or reduced-price meals (a family of four earning less than $41K annually qualifies for reduced-price meals; less than $29K qualifies for free meals).

Increasing Poverty

The numbers of high-poverty schools increased from 12 percent at the turn of the millennium to 17 percent in 2007-2008, according to the Department of Education. Of the total number of secondary schools, 9 percent are considered high-poverty (2,142 secondary schools) with enrollment of one million students. The vast majority of these schools, however, are considered part and parcel of the "dropout factories" spoken of by education leaders.

There's a lot of justifiable concern over the dropout rates of high-poverty schools. But what happens to those high-performing dreamers who enthusiastically pursue academic achievement as a channel through which they might access economic opportunity?

Unequal Education

Numerous studies show that college-educated adults fare financially better than those with just high school diplomas. That would suggest Herculean efforts are ongoing toward ensuring high-poverty schools students have a chance to escape the clutches of their environments. Sadly, the vast majority of high-poverty high schools are churning out graduating classes that lack sufficient academic preparedness to enter college, much less succeed academically.

The paltry percentages of graduating students from high-poverty schools (68 percent) that move to the collegiate level (28 percent) disclose more about the broken system of academic preparation within those schools than the problem of keeping students from dropping out of them.

By contrast, a more robust 91 percent of 12-graders graduate from schools considered "low-poverty," and 52 percent of graduates move on to the collegiate level.

Unequal Impact

Either we are deliberately "educating" students within the walls of high-poverty high schools toward a life of poverty or we are not educating them at all. We cannot have it both ways.

So, who are these students stuck in the dungeons of academic hell? They are who you might suspect: overwhelmingly, racial minorities.