Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and Social History of School Failure.

By Sherman Dorn (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. x plus 167pp.).

Sherman Dorn's Creating the Dropout successfully undermines a number of myths about the "dropout problem" in America. He begins with a demographic analysis of high school in the twentieth century. Using census data - almost surely more reliable than school reports - Dorn demonstrates that graduation rates increased steadily over the course of the century, and that regional, racial, and ethnic differences in graduation rates declined at the same time, as the high school became the standard institutional setting for all adolescents. Perhaps most notably, he shows that graduation rates did not decline after 1970, as some commentators have suggested, but rather continued to increase (more slowly) through 1990. Dorn goes on to chronicle the changing function of the high school over the course of the century as illustrated in the rhetoric of educationists. This rhetoric paralleled the changing demographics; as more adolescents entered high school, its function shifted from that of an elite institution to that of an institution for the socialization of the great majority of American youth. By mid-century, both educators and their critics agreed that virtually all teenagers should be in high school.

None of this is terribly surprising, but Dorn uses it creatively to skewer public hysteria (that emerged in the 1960s and has resurfaced more recently) about the "dropout problem." First, he points out that failure to graduate from high school was not perceived as a serious social problem in the first half of the century, when most American youth did not graduate (and many did not even enroll in high school). Paradoxically, dropping out suddenly became identified as a problem in the early 1960s, even as graduation rates continued to increase. Dorn convincingly demonstrates that the rhetoric of the dropout hysteria ignored the reality of declining dropout rates. Indeed, he suggests that dropping out became a "problem" precisely because it became deviant; adolescents were now expected to be in school.

Dorn goes on to argue that education policies of the 1960s also failed to match the fearful rhetoric of the dropout "crisis." His case studies of the political squabbles that crippled anti-dropout programs in a number of cities are not terribly helpful; the details are interesting, but they do not shed much light on the more general structural problems that hampered effective implementation of anti-dropout programs. But he is quite convincing when he returns to the broad point that anti-dropout programs were unlikely to make a difference because they had no constituency in a position of power: at the ground level, teachers and principals had no incentive to try to retain students who were at risk of dropping out. This argument is consistent with the work of Michelle Fine, who studied a New York City high school in the late 1970s and found that teachers and administrators were more than willing to let students drop out routinely, getting "difficult" students out of the way.(1)

Dorn further argues that educators not only willingly permitted students to drop out, but also actively pushed them out in great numbers at the same time that they were lamenting the "dropout problem." But his discussion of the increasing use of suspension and expulsion in the 1960s fails to live up to its promise. He suggests that many school administrators responded to desegregation orders by suspending black students who were attempting to integrate previously all-white high schools. The charge is a plausible one: in a similar context, Joseph Tropea has powerfully demonstrated resistance by educators to judicial orders.(2) In Washington, D.C. in 1967, a federal court ordered the abolition of a remedial education program because it included a disproportionate number of nonwhite children, whose assignment to the program removed them from regular classes. Tropea found that educators in Washington schools responded to the order by classifying students as behaviorally deficient rather than academically deficient. These educators found a way to remove "undesirable" children from regular classrooms in spite of a court order. Unlike Tropea, however, Dorn provides no direct evidence for his charge (despite suggesting that statistical evidence may be available, p. 107). His argument is significantly weakened by a lack of statistics showing an increase in suspensions in response to desegregation.

In his final chapters, Dorn brings the story of the "dropout problem" forward to the present and offers some recommendations for policy. He turns one aspect of the conventional wisdom about dropouts on its head, noting that "the dropout stereotype . . . reinforced the belief that schooling was necessary to prevent dependency - even though full-time schooling represents guaranteed dependency for a large portion of a person's life." (pp. 133-34) Although this is intriguing, it would be useful to know whether dropouts are in fact subject to lengthy periods of more debilitating varieties of dependency later in life. Dorn's interest in the "construction" of the "dropout problem" may here obscure some real problems associated with failure to graduate from high school.

Dorn makes a trenchant criticism of the GED, noting that its proponents have failed to understand that increasing the number of people with a credential dilutes the value of the credential. In short, it is not surprising that the GED merits little respect in the marketplace. The concern with providing an alternate credential, Dorn persuasively argues, is a distraction from the more basic social need to provide all citizens with a substantively valuable education. Indeed, Dorn more generally wants to challenge us to view dropout rates in terms of inequality of educational opportunity rather than social pathology. The proportion of blacks who failed to graduate from high school, Dorn shows, remained twice as high as the proportion of whites failing to graduate even in 1990. (table, p. 15)

In sum, though occasionally a little thin in its evidentiary support - particularly of the kind that serves him so well in the opening chapter - Dorn's book offers a convincing corrective to stereotypical views of the "dropout problem."

Brian Gill Institute on Education and Training, RAND

ENDNOTES

1. Michelle Fine, "Why Urban Adolescents Drop into and out of Public High School," in Gary Natriello (ed.), School Dropouts: Patterns and Policies (New York, 1987), pp. 89-105.

2. Joseph Tropea, "Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1950s-1960s," History of Education Quarterly 27 (1987): 339-361.