By Alex Holland and Beau Trapp
(From The Daily Cardinal, April 10th, 2013)
Perhaps there is no bigger civil rights issue of our time than education reform. The achievement gap between high and low-income children born in 2001 is 40 percent higher than it was in 1976, according to a Stanford report.
The Alliance for Excellent Education states Wisconsin is home to 13 (eight more teeter on the edge) of the nation’s almost 1,600 drop out factories, schools which the graduating class is comprised of less than 60 percent of the students who entered freshman year. More than one-in-ten schools in the nation can be categorized as “drop-out factories.” Each lost diploma translates in $8,100 earned per individual or $1.8 billion in lost revenue per year for Wisconsinites alone.
One thousand six hundred dropout factories is 1,600 too many. That is why Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is so vital to improving our education system. The countries that out-educate us today will outdo us tomorrow. DFER comes with the expectation that we, as a nation, can do better to educate our children.
DFER recognizes that the status quo for many schools is working and we should not change that. However, for the schools that the status quo is failing, DFER demands that we improve schools to ensure American primary and secondary schools are the best in the world because it is the right and moral action.
Read the full post here.