Is Change Going to Come?
That might not be soon enough for Mississippi, which, along with Louisiana, has the highest proportion of young adults aged 16 to 19 who are considered “disconnected”—they are not in school or working—according to the Kids Count Data Center, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The report found that with 12 percent, Mississippi has some 22,000 disconnected youth. If all these youth were in the same school district, it would rank as the third largest district in the state.
That number is far too large, says Donna Harris, an independent researcher in Rochester, N.Y., whose work focuses on how students progress from kindergarten through 12th grade. “We need to look at how schools’ policies and practices push students out of schools,” Harris, a former faculty member at the University of Rochester Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development said. “It’s too easy for us to say it’s the parents and the kids that are causing the disappearance.”
Most people refer to students who leave school prematurely as dropouts. Harris says too many students are actually pushed out because they are bored, miss too many classes or lack social and emotional support.