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Origins of the “Dropout Problem”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Sherman Dorn
Sherman Dorn*
Affiliation:
Peabody School of Education, Vanderbilt University
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Extract

Age-specific patterns today help shape social roles for United States citizens. People living in this country generally attend school by age six, have their first jobs by their early twenties, and retire from full-time work by age seventy or seventy-five. These experiences create, and, in turn, reflect, expectations about the timing and progression of human experiences. People who fail to meet these expectations, or norms, often encounter unwanted advice, bewilderment, or outright hostility. One example of this set of expectations is related to dropping out of school. Those without high school degrees today face a severe disadvantage when they apply for jobs. Even the most menial positions require a high school diploma. Those without degrees are essentially left without desirable economic options.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , Fall 1993 , pp. 353 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Recently, social critics have begun commenting on this phenomenon of age classification. Specifically, Howard Chudacoff has explored the development of age norms in his book How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1989).Google Scholar

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3 One should always be wary of simplified content analysis, and I am not claiming that Figure 1 proves the new dominance of the term dropout in the 1960s. Journal publishing has mushroomed at different points in the twentieth century, and the growth in articles on dropouts certainly reflects an increase in articles on education topics indexed by the two services. However, article titles do reflect journal editors' preference for intriguing subjects or knowledge of catchphrases; thus, the increase in articles on dropouts, and the decline after 1965, is evidence of a definite surge in interest in the topic in the early 1960s.Google Scholar

4 Comments by Linda Burton and Michael Katz have suggested the link between age norms and social institutions. Linda Burton, presenter (Seminar on Work and Welfare, University of Pennsylvania Program to Assess and Revitalize the Social Sciences, 18 Apr. 1991); and Michael Katz, participant (Seminar on Work and Welfare, 9 May 1991). For histories of senescence and retirement, see Haber, Carole, Beyond Sixty-five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past (New York, 1983); and Graebner, William, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885–1978 (New Haven, Conn., 1980). Some may wish to extend this discussion to psychometric notions of normative development or see the term dropout as a deviance label. I am not using the notion of age norms in a psychological sense, and I do not believe the evidence supports such an interpretation.Google Scholar

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6 The demographic confirmation of higher graduation trends is too technical to document in this article. See Dorn, Sherman, “Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and Social History of School Failure” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), ch. 5.Google Scholar

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30 Space does not permit an extensive discussion of why the early dropout literature rarely mentioned equity issues or the desegregation controversy then raging. Let it suffice to say that although the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, insisted that equal opportunity in education had become essential to individuals, neither the arguments nor the language used by the Supreme Court made their way into the material cited here.Google Scholar

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