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Today, parents take a non-interest in their children's education, right or wrong as that may be. Why is this? I would like to know that answer, although I think we'll never find the root cause. The main problem is that it seems the only time when education class/program should be required is to have a child, but unfortunately, that will never be the case. If I personally had to identify one reason and one reason only for why our education system sucks, it's that the parents themselves are not involved nor educated. There's a correlation between parents' education level, and that of their children. There's something to be said about that. When the parents aren't educated and can't help their kids with homework because they themselves do not understand it, what can we expect for results?

45.3%, 45.3%, 51.5%, 54.6%, 49.6%...24.9%; this is a list of high school graduation rates of our largest cities by population (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia)as well as the nation's lowest rate, Detroit. It's not as if you're rolling the die in Detroit, and only 1 in 4 students will graduate. I'm sure there are very nice schools in Detroit. But there are obviously more terrible schools than great schools, just as there are more disadvantaged people than rich people. Economics play a part in this, as the great schools are clustered next to great schools and the poor schools are clustered with other poor schools. This is an assumption on my part, but I'm confident that a minute percentage of parents in the great school districts would allow those kids to drop out.

Let's get serious, what can a child gain by dropping out of high school? The minimum wage isn't enough to support oneself. I'm going to generalize here, as it's my opinion. These kids aren't doing anything once they drop out except drain society. These are urban areas, they're dropping out to be involved in gangs and crime. This isn't the heartland and they're to the family farm. The parents are either blind, uninterested, cannot control their children or basically unfit as parents.

What's the solution to this? Schools should be graded and rewarded/punished by their graduation rates and standardized tests. Bad graduation rate, bad scores: year round, all day school. If students are not scoring well enough, MAKE them attend study halls, tutoring sessions, extra curricular academic groups. Great schools, status quo. Reward them by providing additional freedoms, attention or even pay them. The money we supply to the high dropout schools is obviously for naught, so use it to reward the best schools. If there's one motivational aspect to kids, it's that they want what their peers have.

If the government can step in and protect ourselves from talking on phones while driving, smoking in public, etc, they should mandate schools. It's sadly more likely you'll be killed by one of these dropouts than die from second hand smoke. With the election approaching, you hear about stimulus this and rebate that. Education is not on the top of any candidates list because the differences made today will not be seen for a decade or more. You'll never be able to quantify the difference that education will make on many of the issues which are being brought up; economy, crime, health care,etc.

If parents aren't doing the job they need to do, then let's do it for them. Pre-school is for babysitting, not high school.

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