Eddie waited till he finished high school; he went to Hollywood, got a tattoo. He met a girl out there with a tattoo too; the future was wide open (Tom Petty)

An American reader from OnlineEducation.net sent me this graphic to critique, which I did.


Via: OnlineEducation.net

The most striking thing about it, apart from the grammatical error ('one out of four...don't graduate') was the alarming statistic about 7,000 students dropping out of school every day.

EVERY DAY!!

So, say American high schools work for 180 days a year (as do schools in the UAE and NZ), that's a whopping 1,269,000 students a year that leave school before they graduate.

Where do they go? What do they do? What is the cost to the nation?

But I guess the question that the American education system needs to ask is WHY?

An excellent fact sheet on American school drop outs is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/GraduationRates_FactSheet.pdf . According to them there is no single identifiable reason.

The next biggie is - What can be done to stop this tragedy?