Craig McClay encourages us to support young men staying in high school by helping them with tools for life.
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When it comes to “Dropouts,” Things Are Never As They Seem!
Fret not. I’m not going to fill your head with tons of clichés. I am, however, hoping to engage your mind then challenge you on a few things.
Now, do you know someone who stopped attending high school before graduation? Do you know someone who was tempted to do so? Do you know the reasons why they were tempted to stop, or actually stopped, attending school before graduating on time? Who was that person? What’s the real story behind their circumstances?
This is the question we set out to answer through our work at America’s Promise Alliance, the nation’s largest partnership dedicated to improving the lives of children and youth. We were posed with a challenge: recently, the U.S. reached an all-time high of an 80 percent on-time high school graduation rate. But we wanted to know: what about the remaining 20 percent? What is happening in their lives, and what do they need to stay in school?
In the summer of 2013, our team set out to answer this question. We embarked on the largest research study to date that probes why so many young people—particularly young men of color—stop attending high school before graduating on time. We talked in group settings with more than 200 young people, and surveyed more than 3,000 young people who fit this description.
We found that for so many young people, crisis is the norm.
These young people—particularly the men—faced multiple adverse experiences in varying toxic environments – environments in which they became victims of gun violence, witnessed family members or close friends raped or even murdered, and more. Despite this, in nearly every case, they kept pushing and fighting for legitimate opportunities to achieve better futures.
They told us that their families were in crisis and their lives were riddled with one critical choice after another: stealing to eat versus working through hunger, doing ‘it’ right now vs. investing time and energy to get a ‘better it’ later, adhering to family values versus the culture of friends, attending school versus getting a job, sitting in class versus finding a place to sleep at night, and the list goes on.
Despite these challenges, many of the young men we spoke with are living with disproportionate levels of adversity, bouncing back, and reaching up for opportunities to get the education or training they need to get a good job that will allow them to take care of themselves and their families.
But for too many young men in this country, overwhelming adversities are taking precedence over their lives. Their primary human needs are not being met or fulfilled: Although it’s hard to believe, food, water, shelter and safety often present daily struggles that trump Pythagoras’ Theory. Insufficient health care practices and policies threaten the lives of poor people in ways that many of us can’t imagine. Incarceration rates and punishments for non-violent crimes have, in effect, wrecked or shredded family structures. In this paradigm, young men grow up in households where there is no strong, ‘positive’ male presence. A majority of the young people we spoke with in the group interviews came from single-parent families usually headed by the mother. A related problem is: what happens when that single parent has to get a second or third job, or becomes ill?
The tragedy on top of the tragedy is that no one is seeing or understanding these realities. Instead, we see the dysfunctional behaviors, the withdrawn affect, the empty desk, the absent father and the tough guise. And, some of us say, why can’t these young men just sit there and pay attention? What is so hard about that? After all, we think: I did it!
But here’s the reality: high school teachers are often too overwhelmed with other responsibilities. Meanwhile, the students suffer because there is no one to connect with the child and his family to understand the family’s situation. This is tough on everybody. Teachers and students alike pretend that the issues don’t exist or the solution offered creates more problems and the cycle rolls on. Because everyone is so overwhelmed, rather than facing the adversities, we create off-ramps to the traditional path of education and family-sustaining careers. Alternative education offers another platform for educating the nation’s youth and it’s a mixed bag. And, the bag itself has been misunderstood.
Instead, paths to social dependency, incarceration or early death have replaced the tried and true channels we need to lead these young men on a better path. In short, none of these are options we would wish for our own lives or that of our children. And the problem creates tremendous strain on our social systems, our collective resources, and our overall national happiness index.
So what do we do? I think it’s high time we think about engaging young men in new ways. It’s time to change the conversation.
To start, I encourage you to read the report that sums up our research, entitled ‘Don’t Call Them Dropouts’. It will help you understand the reasons why young people are leaving our nation’s high schools and how we can engage with these young people to improve their odds.
The next step involves reaching out and connecting with a young man in your community who may be living this scenario and in need of a sounding board, a listening ear, or just a friend. Connect with a young man you know locally, and build a bridge to him by just being present and listening to his story as a first step. Through this process, you can work together to create a life plan with that young person and take meaningful action supporting him so he may experience success. It’s not going to be easy. Anything worth doing isn’t easy. It must be done, however, to meet the challenges we face as a world, a nation, as local regions and as individuals. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
After that, I challenge you to change the lexicon—because we all know how harmful stereotypes can be. I would like you to think of the words that come to mind when you think of the term ‘dropout’. Does the term accurately describe the young person with whom you connected? Chances are, it doesn’t—and it just perpetuates the problem, particularly for poor young men of color because there is so much negativity in the ether about Black males and unemployment.
I find it very interesting that people of color from other countries do not identify as Black because of all of the negativity surrounding Blackness. Humanity is strange in many ways but none as profound as our unique ability to respond or live up to projected expectations. One thing we all could start doing today to tackle this is check our racial and class sensitivity meters. Then, we could go one step beyond that to recalibrate our internal race and class sensors (I know, no one reading this sees color or class – yet we still act like we do). To do this, move yourself out of your comfort zone: Ride a public transit bus or subway, do your laundry at a local laundry mat, jog through an inner city, move into an inner city if you have the means, surround yourself with people who do not fall into your usual echelon and befriend at least one new person or family.
I would encourage this dynamic in the other direction as well: Take a ride to the other side of the tracks and get off at a stop where things appear completely different from your usual setting. Have lunch or dinner with a person or family—not in a patronizing or tokenizing way—and listen to their life stories. Then share your stories. This is our vehicle to drive hope. This will create an opportunity to listen and learn deeply.
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. And, for those of us who have seen young men struggling to get their lives ’on track’, your insights are needed. So, please show up, listen up, then speak up, and team up with young men who are working hard to be heard—and help us lift up as many young voices as possible. We’ll all benefit in the end.
Photo : Eric Chan/Flickr