David: No doubt that high school drop out rates has
lead directly to low income and low productivity, and, if a local population is saddled with a number of them, there is a real economic problem, as well as many other problems which grow out of that.

Of equal or greater concern is the huge number of kids who stay in school but perform at substandard levels, and score poorly on the State MEAP tests, which is one of the only ways available to us to measure the depth and breadth of the problem.

I have conducted Tri-County public high school comparison tests several times over the years, and the quality of many of the prominent and adored local high schools are doing a terrible job of educating our kids, leaving them poorly prepared to pay for their own lives, and their future families. That also has a profound deadening effect on a community's economy.

The college bound kids are usually educated enough to get into one college or another (where they often get hit in the face with the realization of how they stack up to their peers), but it is the great number of the non-college kids that are getting terribly underserved.

This is a nasty little secret that the education establishment and those concerned with public appearances manage to keep under the rug, but the data is open and available for anyone to examine. I have done it several times in the past.

Do you have any interest in this low level performance by our schools and the implications for us all?