US schools fight to keep students amid fear of dropout surge

There isn't data available yet on how the pandemic has affected the nation's overall dropout rate — 2019 is the last year for which it is available — and many school officials say it's too early to know how many students who stopped logging on for distance learning don't plan to return.

“If we lose a student, it is going to be after kicking and screaming and fighting tooth and nail for them,” Pitsch said. To keep students on track, some local governments and school systems have waived certain testing requirements for graduation or changed grading policies so that missed assignments aren't as damaging. But such leniency carries the risk of watering down academic standards, said Russell Rumberger, a professor emeritus of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written about dropouts.

Among them for much of this school year was Jose Solano-Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas. In January, when he was at his lowest point following the deaths of one grandparent from COVID-19 and another from cancer in the same week, he estimated that he had missed eight assignments in each of his classes.

Mary Stewart, the school's principal, said there was “radio silence” from hundreds of students in the fall. But the number who weren't accounted for shrank to about 40 by the spring after staff hunted down siblings and scrolled through Facebook searching for clues to their whereabouts. Persuading reluctant students to return isn't easy. At Orange County Public Schools in the Orlando, Florida, area, substitute teacher Patrice Pullen was assigned in December to oversee a group of 13 seniors who fell behind during virtual learning. She said it became clear on her first day that her most important job would be “rebranding” the students, who had come to see themselves as failures.

Let them be uneducated. There is a big need for burger flippers and ditch diggers.

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