The Underbelly below the Mason Dixon Line

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Because of a new interactive data-mapping tool provided by the Census Bureau which displays “the percentage of adults over 25 years old who have earned” their high school diploma or finished a GED equivalency program across each state and county, it was shown that the area of Southeast Texas just below the Mason Dixon Line is what The Atlantic calls the Southern dropout belt, where high school “completion rates are largely below 85 percent.” As of March 2013, Statistic Brain reported that the total number of high school dropouts annually was 3,030,000. That is 8,300 students per day. The national average is around 87 percentile.

  

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Now here is a pretty frightening statistic. 82% of prisoners in America are high school dropouts. U.S. President Obama took on the dropout crisis in his 2012 State of the Union address, calling on “every state to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.”

“Here’s another way to look at that concentration, where number of college grads in each county corresponds to the size of the bubble. The Southeast comes out looking a bit better here, but the coasts—East, West, Great Lake, and Gulf—still dominate,” according to The Atlantic. Research by Johns Hopkins University found that there are early warning signs such as high absences, poor behaviors and getting an “F” in math or in English class. Huffington Post reports that these behaviors are highly predictive, and you can see them as early as late elementary school, that a student will dropout. If these concerns can be addressed properly at the level required then thousands of students can get back on track.

The data displayed showed that in most of the country most adults over 25 have earned a high school diploma or finished a GED equivalency program. America is no dropout factory!

Image Credit: www.clatl.com, www.theatlantic.com