Dropouts or Leftouts? School Leavers in Canada

Abstract

ONTARIO'S education minister, Gerard Kennedy, has announced that no student will be allowed to drop out of school before the age of 18. The government has promised to link youths' eligibility to obtain driver's licenses with proof that they are still in school or have already graduated from high school. According to Mr. Kennedy, potential dropouts, aka early school leavers, will therefore be motivated to stay in school, if only to get their licenses. One could be forgiven for wondering if Mr. Kennedy resides in Pleasantville, where fresh-faced, clean-cut sons borrow their fathers' cars to take their perky dates out on Saturday nights and dream of one day fixing up old jalopies for themselves. Gee whiz, Dad, thanks. The bulk of the population at risk of dropping out sees car ownership as financially out of reach, even before calculating the extraordinarily high cost of obtaining mandatory insurance. A solution so mismatched to the problem it purports to address must be almost intolerably frustrating to the legions of researchers, advocates for the poor, literacy workers, and educators who recognize that neither carrots nor sticks have much impact on youths who are engaged in the sad process of dropping out of school. The prospects for the 10% of Canadian students who dropped out in 2004-05 are bleaker than ever before. The good news, however, is that more students are staying in school, although there are important gender, race, and regional disparities. (1) The stayin-school mantra has helped reduce the number of dropouts by 7% since 1990-91. Atlantic Canada showed the most dramatic improvement, with Newfoundland reducing its dropout rate during this period from 20% to 8%. But the prairie provinces and Quebec, while slightly increasing their graduation rates, showed less than the rest of the country, with Manitoba posting the highest dropout rate, at 13%. Provincial governments are not motivated exclusively by the desire to improve the lives of their young citizens by keeping them in school. Increasingly, governments have financial incentives to devise successful retention initiatives. According to one stay-in-school advocacy group in British Columbia, one in seven students who drops out receives social assistance within 18 months of leaving school, and 90% of criminal justice expenditures are associated with dropouts. Because of the lower earning power of non-high school graduates, federal and B.C. coffers forgo $515 million annually in tax revenue. (2) No other province has indicated that will follow Ontario's plan to restrict to school continuers the privilege of driving, although both in Ontario and in the rest of the country, significant attempts to retain students are being made, some of which (such as expanding co-op courses and apprenticeships in high school and focusing on success by 12 in elementary schools) have been welcomed. But only New Brunswick and Ontario have amended legislation to require students to stay in school until the age of 18, measure that teachers fear will lead to one of the most difficult of teaching circumstances --dealing with students who really, really don't want to be in school. However well intentioned, these measures implicitly assume that what happens--or doesn't happen--at school constitutes the root cause of dropping out. This assumption is contestable, at best. Certainly, ill-advised curriculum reforms and overly ambitious graduation requirements have had some impact on who stays and who leaves. In Ontario, for example, a study by Alan King identified the new grade-10 math course, reputed to be notoriously difficult, as a juggernaut. Less than 3% of students who failed the math or English courses in the applied stream were able to recover and graduate on time. (3) Yet according to a recent report by Statistics Canada, the profile of the typical dropout suggests that, in many ways, what's going on at school is only part of the story. …