Kids who quit school don't just suddenly drop out; it's more of a slow fade. Typically it begins in the ninth grade, if not earlier, often when life hits a particularly nasty patch and racking up credits in class no longer seems especially compelling or plausible. Ernestine Maisonet started fading in eighth grade, when the grandmother who had raised her died. "She was a woman who worked wonders," murmurs Maisonet, who says she doesn't know her mother and isn't close to her dad. After the death, her family of six siblings fell apart. Maisonet has lived sometimes with an aunt, sometimes with a boyfriend, and sometimes she had no place to go. "I was a good student until my grandmother passed away," says the 19-year-old redhead from the Bronx. Though she was enrolled in high school, she earned just three credits in two years: "I completely shut down. I didn't do good at all." Tanya Garcia, 19, of Brooklyn also went off track at the end of middle school. A fire destroyed her family's apartment and left them homeless for four months. She landed in a large, impersonal high school, and quickly became disengaged. "I started getting into drugs--weed, drinking, cocaine and heroin." After two years of mostly cutting class, she had accumulated a grand total of one credit. When she tried to transfer to another school, "the dean pretty much laughed in my face," she says. At 16, she stopped going to school. "I didn't see myself having any kind of future. I would get some job I hated and just survive."
Against all odds, Maisonet and Garcia are slated to graduate in New York City's class of 2007. They are among some 13,000 students who dropped out or were on the verge of doing so but have been recovered in the public school system. The city's secret? Finding out who was dropping out and why and offering a variety of paths--complete with intensive social support and personalized instruction--back to school.
Nationally about 1 in 3 high school students quits school. Among black and Hispanic students, the rate is closer to 50%. For decades, school districts obscured the hemorrhaging with sleight of hand--using misleading formulas to calculate graduation rates and not bothering to track the kids who fell through the cracks. Getting a more honest accounting became a top priority for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was instrumental in persuading the Governors of all 50 states to agree in 2005 to start measuring graduation rates in a fair and consistent way. Ask Melinda Gates to name the foundation's top achievement in education so far, and she doesn't hesitate to answer, "Getting the nation to look at graduation rates in the right way."
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