A high school diploma is no longer enough

I’ve thought this for a long time. High school diplomas quit being a job qualifier many years ago, although the public schools didn’t want anyone to know that. Now the city officials in Chicago have taken the first step to make that more or less official.

The Chicago City Council was recently presented a proposal by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat who before becoming Mayor was President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff. Many of you probably think this would not be a proposal a Democrat would make because you seem to think that Democrats want everything for everybody, regardless of what it costs. It’s never been that way and it isn’t that way now and this confirms at least some of what I’m saying.

Emanuel’s plan is simple and straightforward. If Chicago city students don’t have plans beyond a high school diploma, the Chicago school system will not grant them a diploma. Plans include being accepted into a four-year college or university, a community college, a trade, tech, or business school, an apprenticeship or internship or service in the military. In other words, it will be an agreement between the student and the public schools to continue their education past a high school diploma.

The national teacher organizations are opposed to this proposal, including the NEA which I was a reluctant member of for twenty years The NEA concentrated on public school education rather than higher education so consequently, we were left out of many policy decisions that affected all teachers and instructors. So it’s not surprising that once a student graduates from high school, the NEA sees its mission as completed and, consequently, believes that students should not be ‘forced’ to do anything more.

But common sense should prevail here. A high school diploma has only been a stepping stone for advanced degrees for at least fifty years, back to when I was in college. Everybody knew it then and everyone knows it now. You can get a minimum wage job with a high school diploma and that’s about it.

Now I know about sages and savants who become billionaires without any kind of formal degrees at all but you surely must know that they are only a microscopic percentage of the population.

Most people who don’t have an education are hanging on the bottom layers of the vine. In fact, The Economist reports that death rates for white Americans without college degrees have continued to rise in the United States. In 2014 and 2015, according to a Princeton University study, the mortality of white men ages 50 to 54 with a high school diploma or less increased 130% since 1998; for white women, it increased 381% during the same period.

Drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide were largely to blame for these “deaths of despair” the study found and almost all street crime from small towns to large cities are committed by people with little or no formal education past high school.

So if you’re really lucky or fortunate and find someone in a high place that likes you, you may be able to overcome these dire statistics.

But most undereducated people in the year 2017 aren’t likely to have those kinds of benefactors and if you don’t, you’re much more likely to be a victim of the uneducated class.

I knew when I graduated from high school in 1963 that I had to get a college degree to have a chance at making the kind of life for myself I wanted. And now it's fifty years later and, amazingly, both parents and students are still wondering if it’s worth the investment to go to college.

According to all the data and the percentages, it obviously is. And I think this bill being presented to the Chicago City Council is only a preview of things to come. If our kids don’t at least have the chance to succeed, what are we doing for them, for us and for our country?