As almost everyone recognizes, if the graduates of Michigan’s schools were equally qualified they would at least achieve much more equal results than is now the case. You would think, then, that a great deal of attention would be paid to equalizing education in Michigan. If you thought that, however, you would be wrong.
Instead, elite, established Michigan — political leaders (of both parties), the major media, leaders of unions, corporations, churches, and the universities — are devoting frenetic energy, and funds, to preserve the right of state agencies to bestow special preferences on women of all races and ethnicities and male minorities (or rather, males of a few selected minorities).
Given the dismal state of minority education in Michigan, these efforts seem like misplaced priorities on a massive scale. USA Today reports, for example, that only 21.7% of minority ninth graders go on to graduate and get a high school diploma, the worst rate of any major city in the nation.
The rest of Michigan doesn’t fare much better. According to the research study on which the above article is based, the graduation rate for blacks across the whole state is only 31.6% (compared to a national average of 51.6% ). By contrast, 74.7% of whites in Michigan graduate, not far below the national average of 76.2%. For black males the figures are even worse: 26% graduate, compared to a national average of 44.3%
But the virtually united phalanx of leaders from all walks of Michigan life are solidly united and busy at work … protecting their right to give preferences to women (who have higher graduation rates than men across all categories) and whatever number of blacks who manage to survive their school system.
(John: You mean 21.7% of minority ninth graders in Detroit.)
Either the goal of all kids graduating from high school is unrealistic, or some crucial piece of the puzzle is missing. I wish I knew which it was. Sometimes I think that there’s too much emphasis put on the high school diploma as meaning a kid is college-ready, when lots of kids aren’t college-bound so that that goal is irrelevant. On the other hand, in Memphis the kids can opt for the technical track if they aren’t college-bound and we still have an abysmal graduation rate. I know what some of our problems are. One is the mobility of individual kids within the school system. Their families move around a lot due to rent problems and so forth, so that they may attend two or three different schools each year. It’s hard to see how the school system can work on retention of these kids when the adults who deal with them pass in and out of their lives so often.
One qualifier to what you wrote: “But the virtually united phalanx of leaders from all walks of Michigan life are solidly united and busy at work … protecting their right to give preferences to women (who have higher graduation rates than men across all categories) and whatever number of blacks who manage to survive their school system…”
… At elite institutions that set their admission standards so high as to exclude minorities from competing for admission without discriminatory preferences …
Affirmative action is not an issue at the local community colleges.
John and Laura: You’re both misreading the article, which gives 21.7% as the graduation rate for all public high schoolers in Detroit, not just “minorities.” Not that it makes a lot of difference, given the likely composition of the public high school population in Detroit, but still . . .
The criticism voiced in the article about the “ninth grade bulge” is interesting. Does Michigan have a HS exit exam beginning in the 10th grade? If the methodology of the study really does involve comparing the number of freshmen to the number of graduates three years later (sorry, haven’t registered w/Edweek, so can’t read it), there would probably really be some sort of hiccup when a new testing regimen set in.
Michelle, quick googling shows this:
By 1980, only 14 percent of Detroit public school students were white; in 1990, only 8.4 percent of Detroit public school students were white; in 1994-95, only 6.2 percent of Detroit public school students were white.
I doubt the trend has reversed itself in the last decade, so I think it’s safe, for the purposes of a blog post, to treat the Detroit graduation rate as a minority graduation rate. (For a scholarly article, we would need more precision, of course.)
David,
Yes, though people who talk about “minority graduation rates” generally don’t treat “non-white” and “minority” synonymously, and I don’t conflate the two on principle. Throw in that “Hispanic” doesn’t equal “non-white,” and you have one large definitional mess altogether.
But I seem to recall that Detroit proper is about 90% Black, so I’d expect the public school population to be similar, if not even more heavily Black.