We cannot attract businesses to the region without a trained workforce. The regions largest school district is hemorrhaging students. Cleveland's student population numbers over 70,000. The district's graduation rate is only 38%. Realize, that means 62% of those 70,000 will not receive a high school diploma. That is HUGE. The implications are staggering.
Those who discuss revitalizing the region, without considering Cleveland's education crisis are like physicians trying to treat the symptoms while ignoring the cause.
Amen. And to underline Matthews' point, the new "State report card" for the district is out with the 2002-2003 graduation rate -- 39.4%. That makes the sixth straight year Cleveland's grad rate has been under 40% of entering ninth graders. Here are the last eight years:
Barbara Byrd-Bennett is fond of saying, most recently in her November speech to the City Club, that the graduation rate is up ten percentage points since she arrived. As you can see, the "report card" numbers don't support this claim.
Neither ODOE nor CMSD makes the data underlying the "official" grad rates available, so we don't know what these percentages really mean -- and it may be true that the district's data problems help to make it look worse than other "urban districts" in Ohio. But that doesn't change the reality that thousands of Cleveland high school kids continue to leave without a diploma, and that the situation is just about as bad now as it was in the state takeover period, before Byrd-Bennett took the reins.
Every year this continues means at least a couple of thousand new entrants in the city's work force without diplomas. When the last census was taken in 1999, Cleveland's percentage of adults without diplomas (31%) was the sixth highest among the fifty largest U.S. cities. And ominously, the 1999 count found that a full 38% of Cleveland's youngest adults -- 18-to-24-year-olds -- had neither diplomas nor GED certificates.