In my two previous blogs, I wrote about disadvantaged children that my wife and I had worked with in Houston. One of the really sad aspects of their lives is the fact that the majority of them will not graduate from high school.
Our adopted children would have grown up in similar circumstances. The problem is that there is no one to rescue these kids.
Several private organizations have released startling statistics that reflect that disadvantaged children in Texas have a poor chance of graduating. In the average year, over thirty per cent of the kids who started high school as ninth graders will not graduate four years later. Records also indicate that 125,000 young people per year since 1986 failed to receive a high school diploma. These numbers are much higher than the official numbers that the state publishes.
The numbers are even worse in the state’s largest cities. In Houston and Dallas, more than half of the students do not graduate. Over the years, these rates will have a staggering impact on the economies of those cities and the state. Young men and women who do not graduate from high school are much more likely to be living in poverty or incarcerated.
The state has several programs to address these problems. But it turns out that the programs have not been focused on the high school students who are the most in jeopardy.
A group of company executives and local advocates for the poor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, started an assistance program which supplemented salaries and improved day care and medical benefit options for working families with low incomes. The study compared the lives of the people that were receiving the assistance to similar families that were not.
The study found that the children whose families were receiving assistance did much better once they started public school and that they had fewer problems with their conduct. It may be a good idea for Texas officials to study the program in Milwaukee. I can not help but believe that it will be cheaper (and more humane) to provide assistance to families on the front end than to just build more prisons.
If you have any suggestions for the educational crisis in Texas, please comment. I do not think that the problem can be ignored much longer.