So, High School Dropouts Are Not Just an Indiana Problem

I ran across Bob Herbert's op/ed piece, Clueless in America, in The New York Times. I thought the culture of kids thinking they did not need an education to be a local event.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Which makes me wonder what these kids are going to do for a living. The following takes my curiosity into some scary places:

Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.

When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.

The darkness gets pitch black when I see news story also from The New York Times: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’. Why should there not be a connection other than in my mind?

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.