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Poverty is a serious problem in Georgia and is the primary reason that kids don't finish high school.
Many male high school students work full-time second or third shift jobs to help support their family, sometimes being the sole support of the family. Try to imagine doing that when you were 16, 17, 18. Try to imagine working third shift and going right from work to school. Even working second shift and having a chance to sleep before school is rough. It's no mystery that a lot of those kids drop out before graduation. Some girls go the same route, even to working in the mills.
Other poor kids drop out because of the humiliation of having nothing but secondhand clothes, home haircuts, no dental care, when other kids in their schools have nice clothes, good haircuts, and their biggest problem is wearing braces. Remember being an adolescent? If so, you should understand why these kids drop out.
Some poor kids drop out because they're going to work in their dad's business and they don't need a high school diploma to be an auto mechanic, pulpwooder, chicken farmer. Or a girl who's studied cosmetology for two or three years in high school and has a mother or aunt who owns a beauty shop, may go to work in the beauty shop while getting the rest of the training she needs for a state license. These drop-outs may have more job security than most college graduates.
Many students don't drop out, earn all the credits required for graduation, but are denied a diploma because they can't pass tests the state requires for graduation. Those who fail the tests are predominantly poor. A large percentage of black students fail the tests. The "No Child Left Behind" mentality of "accountability" hit Georgia decades before Bush.
Kids who grow up in homes where there are books and the adults are oberved reading books as well as reading to their children have a huge advantage over kids who grew up without books, who are usually from poor families. Children who grow up in families and neighborhoods in which everyone uses improper grammar ("he don't," "me and her," "ain't," etc.) are almost learning English as a second language in school. "Head Start" doesn't seem to have helped as much as was expected. One reason may be learning styles.
Most teachers are visual learners and visual learners usually do well enough in school, sometimes very well. Other children are auditory learners and must hear things to learn them, still others are kinesthetic learners who learn best if they can use their hands, would do well working with Montessori materials to learn writing, reading, and arithmetic.
(At one time, Montessori education was very popular and public schools might be using the best of it today if it hadn't been discovered that Maria Montessori's adopted son was actually her illegitimate son. At the time, the US was too prudish to deal with that, just as they were too prudish to deal with Ingrid Bergman's lover affair and out-of-wedlock pregnancy decades later. I'm not sure we're really past this yet. If Maria Montessori were just introducing her educational methods, which she developed working with children in the slums of Rome, today, I wonder if her illegitimate son's existence would again make Americans reject the positive innovations she made.)
But let's not focus all our attention on Georgia or other states with low graduation rates.
The biggest problem in education in the United States is that students are allowed to move on to 2nd grade when they haven't mastered the material taught in 1st grade. That goes on throughout the grades and the result is kids graduating without knowing much, sometimes barely able to read and write, do simple arithmetic. Anyone who has taught high school or college has seen this. I've had high school valedictorians in college classes who had not learned what they should have in high school.
We don't help kids by passing them when they don't know what they're supposed to know. Of course, failing is a blow to self-esteem, that's why we have largely quit failing kids. We've dumbed down high school and college, dumbed down the SATs.
If we could restructure schools so that kids were taught according to what they know in each subject, we could change this. I'm talking about accepting the reality that most kids perform at different grade levels; a child might be in 3rd grade but read at a 6th grade level, do arithmetic at a 1st grade level, know what a 3rd grader should know in terms of science and social studies -- or perhaps be ahead of other 3rd graders because s/he has used his/her higher reading level to read a lot about science or social studies.
Why shouldn't this third grader be in reading class with 6th graders and others who read at that level, but in a 1st grade class for arithmetic? In the first grade class, the teacher would know what the third grader does "get" about arithmetic and ask him/her to help the younger children. Kids who have failed a class usually if not always understood parts of the material so they can help kids going through that material the first time, which helps their self-esteem. Children also need opportunities in art, music, drama, sports and games. All of us have strengths and weaknesses and the more a child realizes his/her strengths, the more courage s/he has to take on his weaknesses.
Schools also need to do more to address different learning styles. But schools and teachers can't do it alone.
Parents have to be willing to have their 3rd grader take 1st grade arithmetic and not see this "failure" as a reflection on their parenting. A lot of parents fight having their child held back a grade, which generally ensures more failure for the poor kid.
We might also consider testing kids before they enter first grade to see if they are ready. Some 4 year-olds could handle first grade work, some 8 year-olds aren't ready yet.
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