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WASHINGTON (April 1) - Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent, with the lowest graduation rates reported in Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland, according to a report released Tuesday. The report, issued by America's Promise Alliance, found that about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation's largest cities receive diplomas. Students in suburban and rural public high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts in urban public high schools, the researchers said. Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular...

Racing to the Bottom by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 18, 2008 When a progressive think tank and America’s leading business group get together and critique education in the United States, it’s official and getting more so—public schools may be getting progressively more expensive but they fail to deliver the service they claim to offer. Both the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce mark as a “prime target of reform: the 2,000 high school ‘dropout factories; across the country that regularly post graduation rates below 50%.” Statistically, that would put one of these underachieving assembly...

The number of California high school dropouts spiked in 2006, the first year seniors were required to pass the state's exit exam to graduate, according to a report presented Wednesday to the state Board of Education. California's high school graduation rate also fell by about 4 percent from the previous year. The analysis found that 24,000 high school seniors dropped out in 2006, about 10,000 more than just four years earlier. The information could give ammunition to lawmakers and others who have criticized the exam, as well as those who have lobbied for alternative assessments. The firm that prepared the...

As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality. There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between...

http://www.zeenews.com/articles.asp?aid=341374&sid=NAT&ssid= Muslim students top the list of dropouts New Delhi, Dec 11: As the number of out of school children was halved to 13.5 million in 2005 from 25 million in 2002, Muslim students topped the list among these dropouts with 10 per cent followed by 9.5 of scheduled tribes and 8.2 per cent for scheduled castes, Rajya Sabha was informed on Monday. The UNESCO in its education for all global monitoring report in 2007 has estimated that there were 13.5 million children in the age group of six to 13 years out of school in the country. The drop...

Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions. WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions . "In jail for eight hours -- sleeping on a concrete floor next to a toilet," Kelly said. "It was a nightmare," Brook said. "I was in there thinking I was just dreaming and waiting to wake up." Collins reported...

The black men I know best are all hard-working, accomplished professionals. They include my brother, a physician, and my buddies — lawyers, college professors, political consultants, journalists. I live in an insular world of middle-class affluence, rarely stumbling into the troubled universe of marginalized underachievers. Until recently. After a contractor walked off the job, I was assigned the task of helping my mother find laborers to help complete her new house in my hometown, Monroeville, Ala., a small place with a declining textiles industry. The assignment led me into an alternative universe of black men without jobs or prospects or...

Bush Plan Would Cut Survivor Benefits By DAVID ESPO ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) - If President Bush gets his way, the venerable $255 Social Security death benefit will fade into history. And 16- and 17-year-old high school dropouts will lose their monthly survivor payments. Not, however, if Democrats get their way. "The Republican Congress has given a whole new meaning to the term 'women and children first,'" Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic campaign committee, said Tuesday. "There they go again," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who heads the party's Senate campaign effort. "They can't resist...

EAST ORANGE, N.J. -- If Sunni A. Salahuddin is not in when you call, his voice mail message instructs you to leave not just your name and number, but your "date of arrest or conviction." That's the kind of information Salahuddin needs, so he can make it go away. Clear Your Record! That's the name of Salahuddin's business. Salahuddin calls himself an "expungement technician." For a few hundred dollars, a fraction of what a lawyer would charge, the paralegal helps people scrub their records clean of arrests or convictions -- blots that can mark them for life, foreclosing opportunities to...

MARYVILLE, Tenn. - A teenager was jailed for nine days after being accused of burning an American flag on the Fourth of July, and he faces trial next month. While the case could test a state statute against flag burning - an act the U.S. Supreme Court says is protected under the First Amendment - prosecutors said Andrew Elisha Staley has yet to argue that he was exercising free speech rights."Bottom line is, the kid got drunk," said Lisa Lee, his mother. "He's never been in trouble before."Staley, 18, is accused of taking the flag from a residence and setting...

A new study shows Philadelphia has an untapped resource -- in college dropouts. It is called the "Graduate Philadelphia" Study, and it was compiled by the Pennsylvania Economy League and the Workforce Investment Board. The Economy League's executive director is David Thornburgh: "In Philadelphia, there are 80,000 people between the ages of 25 and 45 who have at least one year of college but no diploma." Thornburgh says the city ranks 92nd in a survey of 100 large cities in terms of college-educated residents: "In fact, only one in seven Philadelphians, which is about 14 percent, has an associate's or...

/BLOCKQUOTE> "Dropout factories" is how a new Harvard study describes some California schools, finding that dropout rates for Latinos and black students are abysmal. Just 50.2 percent of black boys who entered ninth grade in the Golden State received a diploma four years later. The dropout problem on the whole has been underestimated, says The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, which called for improvements to dropout rate calculation methods and more accountability over the high number of dropouts. The state has reported a graduation rate of 87 percent. Researchers using a different methodology found an overall graduation rate of...

In a searing indictment of California's school system, Harvard University researchers say the state graduates only 71 percent of its high school students -- not the 87 percent it claims. ...The Harvard study found that some California schools are simply "dropout factories" and that dropout estimates for nonwhite students are worst of all: Just 50.2 percent of black ninth-grade boys received a diploma four years later. ...-- Black and Latino students are three times more likely than white students to attend a "dropout factory," a school with graduation rates of 60 percent or less. -- Only 10 percent of black...

Our friends at Harvard have done another study, and the results are eye-opening to say the least. In 2002, the researchers found that about 50% of the black and hispanic students that should have graduated high school in California didn't. The LA Times headline was "New Study Raises Concerns About `Dropout Factories'". Concern? How about outrage? For anyone who believes that our government controlled monopoly on education is working need to have their head examined. Public education is a massive failure, and by denying the failure, we are dooming our children to poverty, substance abuse and early parenthood. To make...

<p>Another bad mark for Louisiana But, is state as bad as ranking might indicate?</p> <p>Eugene Sutherland / Staff Reporter Posted on November 3, 2003 A recent national ranking of the educational prowess of each state shows Louisiana 47th in terms of the overall education level of its residents.</p>

<p>The number of Kentuckians with a high school diploma increased by nearly 10 percentage points over the past decade — the fastest growth in the nation, according to census data released yesterday.</p> <p>But don't pop the champagne cork just yet.</p>

A military investigator says Marine Corps recruiters were wrong in allowing high-school dropouts to enlist after getting diplomas after taking one take-home test. The Marine Corps report completed last week says 17 recruiters at offices in Winston-Salem, Greensboro and Hickory acted with degrees of negligence and misconduct.

Schools 'Promote' Failure http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/31073.htm

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