America's Dropout Crisis

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With unemployment approaching double digits, a Daily Beast survey reveals the number of Americans who never finish high school. Check out the worst cities—and Alma Powell on fixing the system. Plus, read more on Giving Beast, our new philanthropy site.

Every single school day, more than 7,200 kids, on average, drop out of high school—1.3 million each year. In many American cities, including Miami, Denver, Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis, most public school students don’t graduate. In Detroit, the unhappy poster child for American industrial decline, a study from last year showed that a mere quarter of students earn high school diplomas.

Click here to view our ranking of drop-out capitals nationwide.

Getty Images The entrenched nature of the American drop-out crisis undermines the public’s interest, but the effects are wide-ranging and insidious, according to a new analysis of Census data undertaken by The Daily Beast. Cities with large populations of high school dropouts suffer from lower incomes, depressed tax bases, and generally poor social services and quality of life. Indeed, the number two drop-out capital in our survey—McAllen, Texas, where over 15 percent of adults have no diploma—is also the city in the United States with the highest health care costs, and the subject of a searing New Yorker exposé by Atul Gawande.

President Obama has sworn to address the dropout crisis. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, last February, the president called on all Americans to commit to one year of post-high school education. “We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation, and half of the students who begin college never finish,” Obama said. “This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow.”

No Child Left Behind, the controversial Bush-era education law, focused on elementary schools, some experts say at the expense of struggling high schools. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is now committing $3.5 billion to “turn around” the nation’s very worst schools, most of which are in impoverished communities. Just 15 percent of American high schools—known in the education world as “dropout factories”—produce more than half of American dropouts, and three-quarters of black and Latino dropouts. Geographically, these failing schools are clustered in California, the Old South, and the Southwest—the same regions The Daily Beast finds remain magnets for grown-up dropouts, and where the average individual income is just $25,473.

Alma Powell is the chairwoman of America’s Promise, an organization devoted to the well-being of young people that was founded by her husband, Gen. Colin Powell. Since last year, her organization has been convening a series of dropout summits all over the country, bringing together politicians, educators, kids and other members of the community to try and spark a sense of urgency and figure out what can be done. They’ve held 65 so far, and are planning more than 100. “It sounds drastic, but literally the future of our nation is at stake if we do not correct it,” Powell says of the dropout rate.

Like her husband, Powell is non-ideological and socially-engaged. She was a vocal advocate for S-CHIP, the children’s health-insurance program, at a time when George W. Bush vetoed it. School reform, in her view, involves traditionally conservative concerns like taking on the teachers unions, but it also means addressing “kids who come from a poor family and had nothing to eat.” She brings up the tragic story of a young Washington, D.C. boy who had a tooth infection that, left untreated, spread to his brain. “He died for lack of a filling in his tooth,” she says, incredulous.

Fixing the public schools, Powell adds, is not a “partisan issue at all. I think politicians need to stop thinking of it as a partisan issue. It’s an issue of the survival of the country.”

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