The South Is America's High-School Dropout Factory
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/the-south-is-americas-high-school-dropout-factory/282480/Are Americans educated enough? How you answer that question—which seems to obsess certain newspaper editorial boards—really depends on where in the country you look. Some states compete with the best school systems in the world. Some seem to be racing for the bottom. Today, I wanted to offer up three vivid illustrations of how educationally balkanized we really are, courtesy of the Census Bureau's delightful new interactive data-mapping tool.
First, high school. This map shows the percentage of adults over 25 who have earned a diploma or finished an equivalency program across each county in the lower 48 states. The darker the shade of orange, the higher the graduation rate. Notice the giant pale underbelly stretching below the Mason Dixon line from the Southeast through Texas. That's our Southern dropout belt, where completion rates are largely below 85 percent. The national average, for reference, is about 87 percent.
Still, in the majority of the country, most adults have at least earned a high school diploma or a GED. Not so when it comes to college.
Bachelor's degree holders cluster on the coasts, in major urban centers, and in Colorado. The Northeast's Acela corridor is especially full of them. So while, about 31 percent of American adults have a bachelor's degree or more, across many of our counties, fewer than one in five residents graduated from college.
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And not infrequently with autism as defined by clinical criteria. It certainly sounds as though you may have some difficulties regarding social interaction and communication. One may have an impressively large vocabulary, but if one can't learn to communicate on a level that's appropriate to the people one is interacting with then one can expect such a reaction. ("Code-switching"; look it up.) Demotic speech is usually innocent of the degrees of subtlety, nuance and shades of meaning imparted by a larger vocabulary. English is however a varied enough language that one may convey one's meaning while still being understood. (For instance: "apparently", "supposedly", instead of "ostensibly"
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Well, of course, that's all news to me...
In my younger years, I did have difficulty with communication, because I failed to see how insecurities about intellect drive responses to unusual vocabularies. Plus, I attended an Ivy-league college, wherein my vocabulary was not an issue, so it took me a while to 'get' it. Actually, I've been "code-switching" for years. As I've aged, I've learned to use smaller words so that my listener(s) won't have difficulty understanding me. Indeed, my words have gotten smaller and smaller...
I've been an effective advocate for survivors of relationship violence for better than thirty-five years. I do not have difficulty communicating with most individuals--in general, individuals with low self-esteem tend to have the most difficulty with my vocabulary.
I am not introverted, nor am I autistic. I've only once been accused of Asperger's, but my accuser is also a self-avowed racist, sexist, and homophobic Republican, so I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.
As someone who has spent 30+ years in a Southern Metro area with 65%+ minority demographics, it's not hard to figure this is institutionalized racism. Education can help end the poverty in many of these areas but we do not do enough to prop up the education system in these areas.
