But missing from this year’s ceremonies are more than one million kids who dropped out and will not be attending graduation day, dailysignal.com wrote.
The future those high school dropouts face is chilling. They will have a much harder time getting a job and will earn much less than those who did graduate. They’re also more likely to commit a crime and more likely to be the victim of one.
In short, many of them face a life that will be so much more difficult — all because they could not or chose not to finish high school.
The consequences of this crisis are especially evident in the US community. Today, more than half of all African-American students in many large US cities don’t graduate from high school. Think about that.
And those kids aren’t just dropping out — they’re escaping.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, schools that serve majority-minority communities have the worst performance, the highest crime rates, and the largest achievement gaps.
In cities like Detroit, more than nine in 10 black students can’t even read or do math at grade level.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional.
'Massive Resistance' soon followed as many states launched an all-out effort to block integration.
Today, the nemesis isn’t the old Massive Resistance crowd, but a similarly determined cartel of unions, bureaucrats, and politicians. They make a great deal of money from the current system in the form of union dues, salaries, and political contributions.
As a result, they view education equality as a threat and anyone seeking it as their enemy.
Just ask Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Appearing before Congress recently, DeVos testified that her goal is “ensuring that every student has an equal opportunity to receive a great education.”
But rather than be hailed for seeking the equality promised decades ago, she’s being attacked by those who want things to stay just as they are.
But the secretary isn’t just right — she’s echoing the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling which declared education to be 'a right which must be made available to all on equal terms'.
Today in America, that right is conditional. If you are wealthy, white, connected, or elected, your child probably goes to or graduated from a great school.
But if you are African-American or Latino and living in a poor urban neighborhood, your child is much more likely to go to a failing school, a school where more than half of all students can’t read or write well, have low math scores, face the daily threat of bullying and violence, and won’t graduate.
Do these sound like 'equal terms' to you?