Graduate or Drop Out

Hi everyone

I pose a different question to you this week. Colin Powell, one of my favorite Americans, was in the news last week. I wish General Powell would have ran for the 1996 presidential campaign’s Republican ticket. I think he would have made a fine a president. He is a highly decorated Army officer with experience in Vietnam, command in Desert Storm, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I believe Gen. Powell’s resignation as President Bush’s secretary of state was due to the former’s violation of Powell’s own doctrine of warfare. Colin Powell experienced Vietnam and has set clear and strict parameters if a nation’s is going to consider war. Anyway, enough history teacher admiration of Gen. Powell’s past achievements.

Colin and Alma Powell founded America’s Promise Alliance. The group studied America’s fifty largest school systems. It found that fifty-two percent of students in those schools graduate on time. Fifty-seven percent Hispanic and fifty-three African-American students graduate with a regular diploma. Nationally, seventy percent of students graduate on time, regardless of race. Alma Powell said that every twenty-eight seconds a student drops out of school. General Powell recently shared those figures on the CNN program Black in America 2. Gen. Powell said, “The minority dropout rate is catastrophe. It is true that our nation’s minorities drop out a much more exaggerated rate than Caucasian. I stress the importance of race; yet want to consider this issue irrelevant of skin color. I believe socioeconomic status also plays a considerable role. Bagley, a neighboring school, consistently loses twenty percent of a kindergarten class to drop outs.

Finishing high school is one of the minimum standards of success. I share the difference between dropping out, high school graduation, a college education, and professional’s on the first day of school. The U.S. Census estimates an extra ten thousand dollars is earned yearly for the high school graduate. Students will have nowhere near the earning potential each rung down the ladder. Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman believes quitting school can lead down the “pipeline to prison.” The U.S. now has the world’s highest per capita prison population.

I am a psychology teacher. I teach about a concept called hyperbolic discounting. It is postponing the day of reckoning. It is a defense mechanism similar to denial. Think of the ant and the grasshopper story. A person simply refuses to recognize the enormity and risk of their behavior. Or, they skew or rationalize their choices to fit what they believe. One of my favorite experiments gives people a choice. Would they rather have fifty dollars today, or one hundred dollars a year from now? One hundred is double the amount of money, yet most choose the immediate fifty. Cigarettes cause lung cancer. People know this fact. Do they simply discount the future for the pleasure, acceptance, or whatever reinforcement they get from smoking. Does this concept explain why students drop out? Or, are they ignorant of the facts. A handful of Fosston students drop out every year. My question is why, when it leads to such potentially disastrous consequences.

We are educators? I want to be proactive. What can we do? Is there something that we aren’t doing for these kids? The economy today is hard on college graduates. I don’t even like to think about what’s going to happen to these kids. I think prison, addiction, family problems, divorce, absentee parenthood, and stress to name a few.


Minnesota state lawmakers considered a proposal this legislative session that would increase the legal dropout age. It is currently sixteen years of age. The new law would change it to eighteen. Wisconsin is one of the eighteen states that require students to turn eighteen before dropping out. They were right about Brett Favre, are they right about this? State and national figures have spoken out for and against the bill. I am interested in your comments on this proposal. Do you believe that increasing the dropout age would make a difference? Would there be any unforeseen effects? Finally, do you have any other suggestions to slow the rising tide of students that make the bad decision to drop out?