November 22, 2003
Hispanic High School Disaster – The Evidence Mounts
In 2001, I helped Peter Brimelow with a
Forbes article
pointing out that, for all Americans, high school graduation rates had deteriorated,
and were significantly worse than generally
reported. About one out of five 18-24 year-olds failed to get a high school diploma—but
an increasing share got the
General Equivalency Diploma,
which educrats count as graduation although there’s evidence
[Chart]
employers don’t agree.
Commenting in VDARE.COM, Peter
drew the immigration moral:
“Now the immigration dimension: black and white dropout
rates have increased only slightly. The real problem is the increasing proportion of
Hispanics, the result of America’s ongoing immigration disaster. Their dropout
rate [the obverse of the graduation rate] is appalling—45% in 1999.
By contrast, the dropout rate for blacks – blacks!—was only 27%. Not all
dropouts will be welfare cases and criminals. But many will. Which suggests
public policy is importing a new and even more serious underclass problem.”
(The response of the Educrat Blob to
our GED point has been masterful: it has simply
stopped reporting the
fraction of high school “graduates” who in fact only have a GED. Thus the more
recent graduation rates that I report
below include GEDs, generally around 10 percent of the total.)
A reader has just taken exception to our data. He wrote:
“You then stated that the dropout rate for Hispanics in 1999
is 45%. This is misleading for I think you were talking about foreign-born Hispanics….but the
rate in October 2000 for all Hispanics was 28%.”
This was our point precisely! The
influx of uneducated
Hispanic immigrants is now so great that it is
actually distorting the overall numbers.
But even after factoring out recent immigrants,
Hispanics are doing
significantly worse than white and black Americans.
Here are the most
recent figures from the National Center for
Education Statistics:
(High school degrees now include GEDs, remember.)
As troubling as these statistics are, they don’t tell the whole story.
More than half of Hispanic immigrants never enrolled in
a U.S. school. But they are counted as high school
graduates if they completed school in their country of
origin—regardless of its standard.
And these dropout rates are for young persons. It gets worse for older
immigrants. Fewer than half (47%) of Hispanic immigrants
aged 25 to 44 have earned a high school diploma.
It’s easy to blame economic necessity for driving Hispanic immigrants
out of school. But the facts suggest something else is
at work. After all, Blacks are somewhat more likely to
live in poverty than Hispanics, but are much more likely
to graduate High School and attend college.
So why do Hispanics drop out? Problems
learning English, exacerbated by the disaster of
“bilingual education,” have undoubtedly driven
many Hispanic students out of school.
School violence and
gang activity may be contributing factors.
Dr. Lauro Cavazos, the former Secretary of Education and the first
Hispanic Cabinet member, suggested a few years ago that
Hispanic parents were to blame for their childrens’
dismal record. Instead of encouraging their kids to
continue their education, he argued, many Hispanic
parents pressure their children to become
self-supporting and to contribute to the family income.
Needless to say, Cavazos was roundly criticized. But the
data support him: More than 70% of Hispanic immigrant
dropouts are active members of the labor force, either
working or looking for work. (Which may sound good, but
by definition such work is
unskilled and of little value.) That’s not true for
native dropouts, who are much more likely to be
idle….and perhaps more likely to resume their education
at a later date.
[Number fans can
click here for charts.]
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email
him) is President of
ESR Research
Economic Consultants in Indianapolis.
