The Continuing Saga of the People Who Are Driving Our State into a Ditch Believing That They Are the Ones to Solve Additional Problems

Here's another one:

“The Rhode Island High School Dropout Prevention Act of 2007” (2007 - H5351) makes it the responsibility of the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary education to work in collaboration with local school districts and the Department of Higher Education to implement strategies to lower the state’s dropout rate.

“Rhode Island has plenty of work to do to keep our kids in school,” said Representative McNamara [(D-Dist. 19, Warwick, Cranston)]. “This problem is not specific to Rhode Island, but the facts and figures on dropouts from our schools are not a proud moment in Rhode Island education. Even as we see an upswing in performance test scores around the state, we are still losing the battle with a lot of our children, who at too young an age are being allowed to walk away from an education that could make their lives so much better in the future.”

I'd suggest that, in a state in which even the brightest, most ambitious students are compelled to seek their opportunities across the border, the solution to this particular problem is more fundamental than tracking truants and formulating programs to push students to even higher levels of (what appears to be) useless education. Motivating the hard cases — and the not-so-hard cases — requires that they see examples of success throughout their everyday lives, and the common theme of that success must be personal initiative, not personal connections and collective advantage-taking.

The more targeted programs the establishment creates, the more money it will funnel into an inefficient, failing system at the expense of the dynamism that would better resolve our state's difficulties in the first place.