originally published in my blog Schooling ≠ Education on July 1, 2005
I just read some information about high school graduation requirements and another article on how states report their graduation rates (this article exposes how the information shared with the public is ‘not what’s actually going on’).
In the work that I’ve done with schools and educators it was apparent (back in the early 90’s) there was a dropout rate of approximately 30%. At this point in time some educators who are being really honest with themselves are suggesting that that rate is closer to 50-60%.
And, from the graduation rates combined with the number of high school graduates that attend a 4 year college or university we know high schools are only really reaching about 5 to 10% of it’s students.
Do you know of any business or industry where it’s acceptable to have a 50-60% defect rate? Do you know of any business or industry that could survive one day that has a process that satisfies 5-10% of it’s customers while producing below satisfactory results for the remaining 90-95%?
What’s going on that the United States of America would allow a process like this to exist when this process directly impacts the lives of several hundred million young people (let alone their families and the communities they live in)? Not just allow a process like this to exist but ‘we’ designed this system and we continue to support it?
I typically give people the benefit of the doubt – that people are good and their intentions are good. So, therefore we might say the education system was designed with good intentions and with ‘peoples’ best interest at heart.
Dr. Deming used to say ‘85% of the problems come from the first 15% of the process.’ Design is a large part of the first 15% of the process. So, we can extrapolate from that, 85% of the problems the education system is experiencing comes from the first 15% of the process (the design).
That alone is a good enough argument for me to look at redesigning public education. There are other reasons as well – which I hope to write about over the weeks and months ahead.
Quick update: My statistics back in 2005 should be taken with a grain of salt (I may have over estimated). In June 2023 the census bureau published a report analyzing school enrollment levels in 2021 (all school ages and grades). The report states: High school dropout rates – defined as the percentage of people (ages 18 to 24) who are not enrolled in school and do not have a high school degree – declined from 12.5% of all 18- to 24-year-olds in 2005 to 5.8% in 2021.
While the report didn’t state a percentage of high school students who enroll in a 4 year university nor who enroll in college of any kind, the report did state enrollments in colleges continue to decline. From the report: College enrollment continued to decline, with 21.1 million students enrolled in 2021, compared to 21.7 million in 2019 and 23.7 million in 2011.
Even if my numbers were wrong in 2005 the statistics in 2021 would suggest there is still a case to consider the redesign of the high school experience.
