Dropout rates are increasing because of the increase in population. On an up to date research accomplished by Thomas DeLeire and Ariel Kalil related to dropout rates in America, they used enrollment and graduation data from school records to obtain the following results. The ratio of high school graduates to grade nine enrollment three years earlier in California has consistently hovered around 0.69-0.74 throughout the last half of the 1990s, suggesting a four-year dropout rate of about 25-30 percent. Population in California is increasing, and so are the numbers of academic achievements as well as the academic failures. On recent studies by Phillip Kaufman, they performed a statistical analysis that shows the percentage of students who drop-out before completing a high school program.
They used data from The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which obtains its information of education in the United States by collecting records from all the school districts. Dropout rates in this report shows that, in October 2000, 5 out of every 100 young adults who were enrolled in high school in October 1999 were no longer in school and had not successfully completed a high school program. 488,000 students didnt complete high school, which accounts to an extremely large number of students. The results of this study show the percentage of students dropping out is decreasing, however, the actual number of students dropping out has increased. This is due to the increase in students attending school, which explains the fact that there are more students graduating, but also more students dropping out from school.
The dropout rate for K-12 students also varies depending on their race and location of the school. There are four major races attending K-12 schools in America: Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White. Nevertheless, not all have the same percentage of dropouts. A study completed by Bryan W. Griffin concerning dropouts, used data provided by The Florida Department of Education in order to accomplish his research. The data was obtained by a random sample of 132,903 high school students from fourteen school districts in Florida, and obtained the following: The dropout rate was highest for Blacks, closely followed by Hispanics, then Whites, and then Asians, who showed the lowest rate. The high rate of blacks dropping out, as well as Hispanics, is because they both account for a large portion of the population in Florida. In states like Kansas, the dropout rate is higher for whites, because the population is mostly white. Another example is North Carolina, where the population is mostly Whites and Blacks, only one out of every other high school student is expected to graduate, and logically, the percentage of dropouts there is higher with Blacks and Whites. Another section of the research by Kaufman et al, he (more…)