Picking up the dropouts should be an "all hands on deck" project

News Flash – the Texas Education Agency has actually identified a few private schools which will be able to get funds to educate public school dropouts. “Horrors!” claim the pro-educrat, anti-student crowd. “Imagine that – giving education dollars to a school which might actually educate dropouts!”

TEA Commissioner Robert Scott deserves cudos for daring to go where the educrat crowd opposed you going... allowing public dollars to be used going to the best schools to educate students who had already been failed by the current public education system.

It isn't entirely the education system’s fault. But a one-size-fits-all usually fits no one perfectly.

Let’s face it – public dollars should be going to educate students, not to institutions. If we go outside the comfort zone and start to fund the child’s education, we would find that the market would provide many opportunities for students to succeed.

The High School Completion and Success Initiative Council had an important mandate – to improve college readiness and to provide help for students at risk of dropping out of school. The Council had a very important task to reduce dropout rates and increase retention.

Right here in America, one student drops out of school every 29 seconds. Every hour of every day, 93 Texas students drop out of public schools. The majority are inner city males. Around 170 Texas schools have been deemed “dropout factories” with some schools in Austin, Houston and Dallas having a retention rate of just over 30%. According to the AP, 20% of Texas schools are “dropout factories”: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/wdc/dropout/index.html.

The majority are inner city minority males. This is our decades’ civil rights issue. And perhaps for that reason, this story goes largely untold.

The numbers represent a tremendous cost to our economy, and an even greater human tragedy, as many of these dropouts slip between the crevices of productive society.

The 2007 class of high school dropouts will cost Texas taxpayers $377 million this year and every year over the course of their lifetimes. It is a travesty.

So it’s time we look to alternate educational venues and provide parents with a choice, and students with a chance.

Those most vulnerable are those students who have already failed in the current public education setting.

That some public schools as well as a few private schools are designated as dropout recovery schools is an acknowledgment that education takes place in a variety of venues – and students don’t come in “one size fits all”.

-- Peggy Venable