School Dropouts

In the spring of 1962, National Education Association (NEA) employee Daniel Schreiber spoke about dropouts at a panel of the annual convention of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals. Portraying dropouts as "running away from work half-done, from school half-completed," he declared: "How American education solves the problem of school dropouts . . . may well determine America's future" ( Schreiber 1962b: 234). Schreiber was one of the primary crusaders who made a headline issue of high school dropouts, and his speech evoked many of the themes that 1960s writers echoed in discussing the "dropout problem."

The ubiquitous usage of the term "dropout" today belies its relative novelty, for the socially recognized category of high school dropouts did not exist until thirty or forty years ago. In a few years after 1960, though, dozens of people wrote articles and books about why dropping out was a problem, who dropped out, and what could be done about it. Of all materials indexed in Education Index and Reader's Guide to Pe riodical Literature between World War II and 1970 on the subject, the number of titles not only increased, but also used the word "dropout" far more regularly, between 1960 and 1965.

The spreading concern over high school dropouts in the 1960s reflected the completion of a long-term exclusion of teenagers from labor markets and the acceptance of a new mission for secondary education. As more adolescents graduated from high school, graduation slowly became an expectation. As the cultures of teenagers came to revolve around public high schools, anxieties grew about the role of schools. Not surprisingly, adults focused much of their postwar anxieties on this rapidly expanding set of institutions. Conflict over school segregation, teacher loyalty oaths, and youth culture arose in part from the growing importance of high schools, and worries over high school dropouts grew from the same milieu. Once it arrived, the dropout stereotype remained in out cultural parlance. The creation of the dropout problem also signaled a new mission of high schools, the prevention of urban chaos. Whereas concerns about attrition early in the century had focused on efficiency, crusaders against dropping out in the 1960s were concerned with the potential for dropouts to become poor, maladjusted, and delinquent.

Important differences exist between the turn-of-the-century debate over vocational education and the debate over high school dropouts. Nonetheless, arguments about the economic utility of education far preceded the dropout problem. Twentieth-century schools have always had critics who thought they do not adequately prepare students for work. omprehensive high schools, in fact, have rarely provided the directly relevant skills or personal contacts needed in labor markets.