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An Explanation of the History of Dropping out for Children
In November and December, 1999, I had a brief correspondence by e-mail with three elementary students in Tennessee who were using the Internet for class research. They asked me for an explanation of the history of dropping out, and I wrote the following for them. Students in middle-school grades should be able to read and understand it.
One hundred years ago, most children in the United States went to school for at least a little when they were your age. Many things about school attendance, though, were very different. First, many schools were open for only a few months every year. Even if children attended school every day, they would spend far, far more time out of school than in it. Second, most children did not attend every day that school was open. Their parents have kept them out for a lot of reasons: they did not like the teacher or books, the weather was bad, or a parent wanted the child to help with work. One hundred years ago, many children worked in the same years as they went to school. There were no laws against children working dangerous jobs or many hours, as there is now in the U.S. There were laws that said children should be in school, but few paid attention to those laws. So many children worked a few weeks, went to school for a few weeks, and worked again.
In addition to having short school years and going to school some days and not others, many children left school entirely to work when they were young. Today, most teenagers go to school until they are seventeen or eighteen. One hundred years ago, many seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds were working, and fewer than one out of every ten children finished both elementary school and high school.
Many people then were upset, of course, that children left school. But since most children left school before they turned fifteen years old, it was not unusual for people to drop out of school. Few even used the word "dropout" one hundred years ago. School principals were more likely to call them "early school leavers" than "dropouts." Over the next fifty years, though, things changed. Schools were in session longer. Children began attending more and more days that schools were open. And children had fewer chances to work as teenagers, so they stayed in school. As they stayed in school longer, more children finished high school and got a diploma (a piece of paper that says you completed a program in school). As more students finished high school, finishing became more than a lucky event: it became expected.
An easy way to remember that change is to know that, in 1950, approximately half of all teenagers were finishing high school. 1950 was halfway through the twentieth century, so "half graduated halfway through the century" might help you recall how much had changed. Today, about 75 percent of high school students earn a diploma, and about another 10 percent earn an alternative diploma after they drop out (usually through a special examination called the GED). Since 1970, the percent of teenagers earning a high school diploma has stayed about the same (or gone down slightly), and the percent earning an alternative diploma has gone up.