Survey Reveals Why High School Students Drop Out | Hacker News Reader

Survey Reveals Why High School Students Drop Out

gatesfoundation.org

45 pointsrobg35 comments

I think education needs to have an objective. We need to say, when you leave highschool, you will be able to make money. You will have a marketable skill that will enable you to provide for yourself. You should be able to fix a car, do some plumbing, wire a house, or SOMETHING. Instead we're robotic zombies memorizing a series of worthless facts. Facts are not valuable. You cannot eat facts for dinner. Information is not the same commodity it was 50 years ago.

This idea that we can mass manufacture intelligent students by cramming them in a class room, reciting curriculum, and bubbling scantrons is nonsense. Real education can't be institutionalized like this, it requires hands on learning and personalized instruction. With tablet computers, a students curriculum should dynamically adapt to the students learning needs. I feel like our education is watered down because there's no competition to teach students. The State has a monopoly on education and we're suffering the unfortunate side effects of a centrally planned industry.

Interesting point about information not being the same commodity is was 50 years ago. It actually seems like information is an even more valuable commodity than it was back then. We seem to be turning into an information based economy where the low level skills that people might learn in high school are quickly becoming irrelevant in today's highly automated, computerized society.

There's a difference between knowing a list of facts, and being able to apply it.

Information nowadays is cheap. A quick search can reveal almost any fact you want. Analyzing a problem given the information available, processing it, creating stuff based on that information: that's the stuff that still can't be automated yet.

That said, I think high school curriculum in general is fine. It's the universities that need an overhaul.

Found a few aspects of this article frustrating.

First, the linked "study" isn't a study at all, it's a summary written for public consumption.

Second, we get no information about how the figures were derived- were these people presented with a multiple choice survey? What choices were available on that survey?

Third, the whole study is built on people's self-reported analysis of their own motivations. While valuable, I know that kind of data isn't fully reliable.

I dropped out for several reasons, one being an unstable childhood, but I don't look back on it. I am successful and generally consider myself to be a well-rounded, critical-thinking individual. None of which school had anything to do with. You can cross parenting off of that list as well.

I would like to see different approaches to education. I tend to see worth in our current system from kindergarten until about grade 5, then it seems to go awry.

From grade 5, forward, I would like to see a "Pull" system implemented, whereby the students pull topics from a full-circle repository of topics, interests, dialects.

Give students the tools to find what they will be good at and give them the space to learn the material they are interested in. Give guidance over teaching.

Having been diagnosed with "A.D.D", I found the curriculum was designed for one type of person and was absolutely inefficient for a relatively large sized minority of students. Yes, the Farmer vs. Hunter argument treads heavily here, but that's the point.

Most students are great with tasking, others have proficiency of hyperfocus. As a society, we should acknowledge that our current vocational system is hurtful more than helpful.

In a system where I could "Pull" interests, I would have faired much better. I know this because this is how I learn new languages, or better implementations of the technology I use today.

As many HNer's know, exposure to data and insightful debate opens up new topics or technologies that you would otherwise be unaware of. Why wouldn't this concept apply to education as well?

One of the major problems in the U.S. is the one-size-fits-all mentality. Thousands of kids are sent to enormous mega-schools and are expected to be stamped through a unified educational process like a piece of mass production. The result is that the public school system becomes more like a holding pen than an educational opportunity.

While the U.S. does do a pretty good job of identifying gifted students and herding them off to more specialized education, it does a very poor job of identifying students for more vocational training.

In many systems, students are segregated early...perhaps middle school...and receive very different educations depending on their chances of going to college and getting a degree or vocational school and learning a trade.

(of course I say this now with a handful of degrees under my belt when I would have been an obvious High Schooler for the vocational education...so it's not a perfect idea by any stretch)

This. And what goes along with it: Not pushing everyone to the same end.

For example, learning math has many valuable aspects. However, learning advanced math is not valuable for everyone. In fact, it becomes detrimental to the student who struggles with it.

Rather than find the subjects that are interesting and worthwhile, students are in situations where they perform poorly and will never benefit from it.

The school system (from the state on down) thinks that requiring more is the solution but they should focus on doing less and doing it very well. Rather than adding more advanced classes to students who already are not benefiting from them, a solid basic foundation should be given and then move the kids into trades and vocations that suit their interests and abilities.

I remember I'd always question my high school math teachers "why do I need this? What will I use this for in real life?". They never had great answers (although in my old age I can now think of good reasons), but providing real life useful context around what is taught I think would help a lot of kids understand the importance.

I always give an answer given to me by a used car salesman. Those who don't understand math can and will get rooked for $$$$ by those who sell them financing.

True, but that is more along the lines of quantitative thinking. All the specific math actually useful to most people (compound interes, depreciation, etc) could be taught in a one semester course.

Yes, the discussions on math regarding high school always seem strange to me. There is a lot of talk about the relevance of calculus and trigonometry (which I personally think are relevant and should be understood, trigonometry is required for woodworking and crafts for example), but the reality is that regardless of whatever classes they have supposedly passed the typical high school graduate has just basic arithmetic skills and many have a competency level below that, requiring a calculator in order to make change from a dollar. They have third grade level skills and nothing more. But the reality is that basic arithmetic skills are taught well and rapidly throughout the rest of the industrialized world. There are various reasons for it and the parents are not to blame, nor are "higher standards" and homework the answer. For kids that are 17 and can't reduce a fraction the answer is not to require them to take calculus next. Alas, by the time one is 14 it is too late to be learning the basics. There is no excuse to be spending so many hours in school and have students that are passed on year after year without knowing basic math and reading skills, and the usual big talk from politicians about high standards won't fix what is wrong.

I felt I had to drop out of my high school because of the one-size-fits all mentality. Outside of a couple of teachers who tried to attempted to challenge me, the rest of the administration felt fine with placing me in classes that were incredibly boring for me.

And no one was willing to help me figure out how to graduate early.

So I dropped out at 15, got a GED, and enrolled in college a year later. All with no guidance from any adult (including my mom - who for obscure religious reasons was anti-higher education.)

At 19 I had to drop of college to help support my mom who was sick and never did get my degree. Since then, I've been successful (shipped some major products, published books, etc).

But, it many years to see the current educational system as anything but corrupt and useless for many years after this experience.

I "dropped out" around 7th grade. I remember asking the teacher "why are we learning X?" "Well, in 8th grade you'll need it!" This Q&A recursed until I realised it was pointless to talk to her. In 10th grade, I moved out of the country and didn't enroll anymore.

Business-wise, this worked out great; more commercial experience programming, earlier.

A decade later, I discovered learning is fun. Learning how the universe works should be amazingly interesting! Instead, I had teachers that would say things like "carbon-14 dating is a trick by scientists that hate god". Sigh.

What's an example of X?

This is going to sound unpopular given the audience here, but I'd bet most examples of "X" in this context will be corners of math. Math tends to be more cumulative than most other subjects taught in high school, and as such it's the subject that jumps to mind when the answer "next year" makes sense when someone asks "when am I going to use X?" Trigonometry, for example, or matrix math are highly esoteric in the context of a usual high-school student, yet they show up all over the damned place when you get out of high school and into more advanced studies. This is a real shame because math is essentially a vocabulary for solving problems and there should be dozens of answers a teacher could give to that ? besides "next year."

As a drop out, I personally found the reasons hit pretty close to home.

However, I think the assumption that all drop outs never do anything education wise again is misleading. I ended up getting my GED, going to college and then got my graduate degree.

Dropping out of high school does not equate a bad future. In fact, I believe if I hadnt had a few extra years to figure out what exactly I wanted out of life, I would have failed spectacularly in college.

It's interesting to see the reasoning and the regret (most people wish they had finished). However, I wonder what sort of bias is introduced looking backward. Are these the real underlying reasons for dropping out or just surface excuses retrospectively used?

I dropped out of high school partially because my bouts of depressive laziness contrasted with manic hyperactivity aren't well-stacked against the constant intense effort that the educational system requires. You could literally see quarters of steady grades (sometimes 4.0s) followed by quarters with a bunch of Fs in them.

I was taking community college classes instead of 11/12th grade so it wasn't a big "OH I'M DROPPING OUT" thing for me, I just didn't turn in some portfolio because I was working on a different project and honestly didn't give a shit about some piece of paper. Perhaps some part of me just wanted to fuck with the system and prove how useless the pieces of paper are when compared with the ability to create cool shit.

Yes, I would say the my inner rebellious nature wouldn't allow me to have any formal education. I am one lab class away from an associate's degree and taking anything but lab classes in community college :)

I am only 19 so I really do not know whether I am on a path to drug-addled self-destruction (as a typical high school dropout) or something else.

I don't know why Gates is advocating for fewer drop outs. Drop outs are one of the few things that is working for kids.

Schools segregate on age now not ability.

For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education.

For not-smart kids, vocational education from 15-17 leading to apprenticeships gives them something of interest and useful to them.

For average kids, the system might work if the other two groups who are frustrated were channelled towards more useful pursuits than sitting bored, and sometimes forced to take amphetamines like Ritalin just to have the appearance of being focused.

I think the way you've partitioned the universal set of kids into "smart" and "not smart" to make your case-by-case argument is an insufficiently nuanced breakdown. What about other axes, such as work ethic, or affluence, or...?

Yeah, you are right, but some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal so I don't feel it would be appropriate or needed to completely break down every possible combination. "Smart" means kids that would be in gifted programs which don't exist anymore. "Not smart" is kids who go on to be plumbers. This is not sufficient itself since there are smart people that go into plumbing, and there are dumb people that get degrees. But it's the general idea that the current system of training everyone in identical classes using a curriculum created by bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen selling textbooks in order to pass a standardized multiple choice test is not an ideal one. I hope that is clear.

...some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal...

True, you don't need to be quite so formal here, but can you really say that you've "made the point" if it's based on hand-waving and dubious generalities? I ask because you're trying to undermine why the Gates Foundation would look at dropouts as a metric — a point that you can't make with such a transparently flawed model. At best you can say that you've created an illusion of having made a point.

Where is this sentiment favoring dropping out of our education system coming from? HN and related community has had several discussions about dropping out of college (and now high school). Peter Thiel offered to pay college students to drop out.

Despite our (likely inferior to other countries) educational system, high school and college graduation directly benefits children. By graduating high school, a student will have a minimum level of knowledge (basic literacy, arithmetic) applicable in society. A higher national high school graduation % is better than a lower %.

Advocating students to drop out of high school for community college or trade school is not scalable. Today, ambitious students take AP/Honors/Community College or learn trade crafts after school hours. Blanket favoring kids dropping out of high school is irresponsible as it hurts their future.

I'm currently a high school student taking five AP classes, and I can tell you that most of my AP classes just teach what people need to know on the AP test. I'd much rather take an Honors class than an AP class, but at my school Honors classes aren't offered when APs are. I learned most of what I know now before I even went to high school - I'm a victim of this educational system stratifying by age, and I can tell you that it didn't work for me.

The other thing that I see is that most of the people in my AP classes are diagnosed with ADHD and are put on Ritalin... to keep them paying attention in some lackluster classes. Ken Robinson's first TED talk says it a lot better than I can, but I do favor vocational tech and stratifying by ability, although I can see that that will open a whole new can of worms, such as parents pushing for their children to be top-tier.

Why don't you just study for the AP exams yourself? I self-studied for 4 AP exams (along with other course work) in the last year of high school, and I did pretty well. The AP exams are actually a joke due to the number of unqualified students who take them and the bell-curve system.

I took the AP computer science exam without any prep and got a 5. The issue is that classes aren't offered at the Honors level if there's an AP class that could replace it, and for the classes I'm taking (AP Stats, Psych, Physics, Calc, English, and accelerated Anatomy) it's not worth it to take the accelerated version (Anatomy isn't offered above accelerated, and ironically enough is my favorite class; there's actually more physiology than anatomy, and the memorization isn't that bad).

According to the US BLS, people who do not have a high school degree/GED have been the top-ranked for unemployment when partitioned by education over the past decade. The difference has ranged from 5-10% higher unemployment than the mean unemployment.

I dug those stats out of the BLS site myself.

While I think we can all recognize the problems with the education system, it is absolutely poor advice to recommend dropping out of high school. The statistics are brutally against it.

That statistic is not compelling because one might suspect that the people who do not have a HS degree/GED would be top-ranked for unemployment even if they had acquired those qualifications.

It also ignores the effect of drop outs like me that have founded companies that have created hundreds of good paying jobs. But that's all counted as 1 drop out = 1 job. If I hadn't dropped out and was forced to stay in the useless hell hole that is public high school education, I would have killed myself or others and none of these jobs would exist.

Mine is not an isolated story either, here is a list of drop outs all should take a look at before advocating that talented kids should be forced to suffer the abuse that is state school institutionalization: http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/lists/dropouts.html

Klebold and Harris would be designing video games today and have people working for their firm if they had dropped out of high school instead of staying and suffering abuse from violent bullies and petty ignorant teachers at Columbine High School.

For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education.

Washington actually has a program called "Running Start" that implements this idea.

Thanks, interesting, it looks like that started as a dual enrollment program but now they've passed Washington State House Bill 1758 last year which says that if you're in the program and get an AA you also get a State High School Diploma and can skip the regular one. That is smart as it acknowledges that some kids were getting held back by trying to complete high school requirements when it would be better for them to move forward and simply complete a degree.

Just check these interviews about Education from this page:

http://www.thebyteshow.com/JosephPFarrell.html

To be precise:

http://www.thebyteshow.com/Audio/JosephPFarrell/JosephPFarre...

I think what's described in those interviews is very telling..

I left school in year nine (Australia) for two reasons

Primary) I never learned a single thing in school that I had not already learned from self study. I am a hardcore autodidact so I don't take this alone as evidence that school is just not useful, but it certainly doesn't seem to be that rare, either.

Tertiary) I was offered a job working with computers for what was an extremely large amount for a fourteen year old in 1994 (50k AUD).

The worst aspect of this however is that for a significant period of time after I had dismissed school as not useful, my only experience of school had been compulsory education, which I now know to be enormously removed from the kind of education one gets at a university. I feel like my very negative experience of education at an early age poisoned me against higher education, and if I had a single recommendation for pre university schooling it would be that it should be a lot more like university.

On the subject of relevance and motivation, the one and only thing that encouraged me to do any actual work in school was when my father offered to pay me a bonus for B's and A's.. In retrospect, it's amazing how relevant everything suddenly became.

They say it's bad, but it worked well for me.

Also: the reason that High School teachers can't tell you why you need to learn x is that they don't know themselves. Having come into contact with a few teachers as an adult, I'm appalled at how little they know. They seemed a lot smarter when I was 14.

I don't know about point 1. My parents paid me for good grades, and my attitude towards learning is a little warped now, to say the least. (They were also Tiger Parents, though. Motivation is a tricky thing to get right.)

For point 2, definitely. I asked my math teacher once what a rigorous definition for a tangent was, and she couldn't give me one. Blah. All these unhappy postdocs and grad students should teach high school.

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