Obsessive Compulsion.

EDUCATION

The folly of mandatory high-school attendance.

Mr. Toby is professor of sociology at Rutgers University and was director of the Institute for Criminological Research there from 1969 to 1994.

In all the commentary on the murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., an obvious question has gone unraised: Why, if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were miserable at school, didn't they simply drop out? Why did they feel trapped? The answer is apparently that the stigma of dropping out of high school is so great in middle-class suburbs that it is unthinkable.

In all states, compulsory-attendance laws forbid students to drop out until they turn 16 and sometimes until they turn 18 or even older. States have also imposed penalties on dropouts and their families, including reduced welfare benefits. West Virginia began in 1988 to revoke the driver's licenses of minors who drop out of school, and other states have since adopted this approach, even though it has had a negligible effect on the dropout rate in West Virginia.

Why is dropping out regarded as a terrible mistake? First, it is assumed to be a personal mistake because, in a complex, information- oriented society, a high-school education is needed to avoid unemployment. The evidence about the comparative earnings of people with various levels of education seems to support this assumption. Second, it is assumed to be a social mistake.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the education analyst and former Reagan- administration official, describes education as "something that a decently functioning society obliges people to get a certain amount of, even if they don't really want to."

But the case for coerced high-school education-so rarely questioned- really relies on ignoring certain facts and swallowing certain myths. First, the facts:

Fact 1: Some students do not learn what school is supposed to teach them: reading and writing, history and geography, arithmetic and science. The reason may be lack of parental encouragement and help, which research has shown to be crucial in motivating children to learn; it may be that students have physical or psychological handicaps; it may be peer influences. Whatever the reasons, kids who don't understand what is going on in class are bored and disruptive when they attend at all. They become internal dropouts, still enrolled but making no effort to learn.

Fact 2: The presence of these internal dropouts discourages teachers. They often wear high-school teachers down to the point that the teachers stop putting forth the effort required to put ideas into the heads of students. One consequence of burnout is enormous teacher- turnover rates, especially in inner-city high schools with large proportions of internal dropouts. But some teachers hold on grimly, taking as many days off as they are entitled to, including "sick" days (known in the trade as "mental-health" days). Of course, burned-out teachers lose effectiveness at teaching students who are in fact amenable to education; that probably is part of the explanation for the greater satisfaction of students and their parents with secular private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools.

Fact 3: Internal dropouts contribute disproportionately to fights and assaults, and probably to thefts, in public high schools. While occasional violence occurs in most schools, some schools in large systems such as those in New York and Washington, D.C., suffer chronic violence as the internal dropouts multiply while the more serious students flee to private or parochial schools or a school system in the suburbs.

Fact 4: In some other industrial countries where high-school enrollment is voluntary, not compulsory, a significant proportion of young people enroll and graduate. Japan is particularly noteworthy because its high schools are not only voluntary but a major expense. Yet a higher percentage of Japanese young people than American ones graduate from high school. The Japanese go to high school, and do much more homework than Americans, because they are convinced by their parents and the cultural values of their society that their futures depend on a good education.

The United States is surely not Japan, so we may not be able to convince as many of our young people to attend and graduate from school as the Japanese do. But persuasion is possible. We do not compel college attendance, yet the college-attendance rate in America is still the highest in the world. Making high school voluntary and the courses tougher would affect perhaps 5 to 10 percent of students currently enrolled in public high schools. The majority will do whatever they must to graduate. So why do most people shrink from the conclusion that compulsory high-school attendance is unnecessary? On to the myths:

Myth 1: Adolescents can be educated whether they like it or not. Actually, education in any meaningful sense depends on a cooperative relationship between teacher and student. Unmotivated students do not learn enough to justify the effort to keep them enrolled. Laurence Steinberg of Temple University, Bradford Brown of the University of Wisconsin, and Sandford Dornbusch of Stanford University conducted a study of 20,000 students in nine public high schools in Wisconsin and northern California from 1987 to 1990. They concluded that about 40 percent of the students in these diverse educational settings (suburban, rural, and inner-city) were "disengaged" from the educational enterprise. Here is how Steinberg put it in his book Beyond the Classroom:

Disengaged students . . . do only as much as it takes to avoid getting into trouble. They do not exert much effort in the classroom, are easily distracted during class, and expend little energy on in-school or out-of-school assignments. They have a jaded, often cavalier attitude toward education and its importance to their future success or personal development.

Myth 2: The students who will leave school as soon as they can will generate a crime wave. Two studies exploded that myth a generation ago: a national study of adolescents conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan (Dropping Out: Problem or Symptom?) and a study of California youths conducted by criminologists Delbert S. Elliot and Harwin L. Ross (Delinquency and Dropout). Both studies followed students throughout their high-school years and beyond, gathering delinquency data covering the entire period. They independently reached the same conclusion: While it is true that high-school dropouts had a higher crime rate than other students, the higher delinquency rate preceded their dropping out of school and did not increase after they left.

Myth 3: Those who do not complete high school are doomed to live an economically and culturally impoverished life. What kind of job can a dropout get? How about flipping burgers for the minimum wage? Fast-food restaurants have a reputation for offering dead-end jobs, yet they are actually a major trainer of the poorly educated for jobs that lead into the middle class. McDonald's is more successful at training egocentric teenagers, including dropouts, to become good enough workers to move on to better jobs than most government training programs.

The surprising statistical finding of Dropping Out, which looked into the employment experiences of dropouts, is that on average they did at least as well as high-school graduates who did not go on to college. Formal education is not the only path to responsible adulthood. It should also be remembered that deciding not to complete high school is a revocable choice. The former governor of New Jersey, Jim Florio, dropped out of school at 17, joined the Navy, realized that his lack of a diploma was a handicap, took the GED exam, and eventually completed college and law school. Instead of locking the high-school doors to prevent students from leaving, we ought to let those who do leave know that the doors remain open should they wish to return.

The coercion of compulsory education hasn't worked well for a simple reason: Some people do not learn to tolerate school, much less to like it. And some of them engage in desperate coping measures. There was little point in keeping Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High.