A recent post on OregonLive.com, “Portland’s dropout epidemic: Cradle-to-career model offers a proven route for students,” writer Wim Wiewel, President of Portland State University, makes a case for a different approach to education that encompasses a continuum from birth to employment, or “cradle-to-career.”
In Cincinnati, the Strive Partnership has brought together more than 300 organizations to focus on education across a metro area that includes northern Kentucky. Since the partnership was founded four years ago, Strive reports that graduation rates at high schools in the urban district have increased by 11 percentage points to 83 percent. Last year, 92 percent of Cincinnati Public Schools students who took Ohio’s graduation exam passed the reading test, 85 percent passed math and 93 percent passed writing. And those are students in a district where more than two-thirds of its pupils live in poverty, a much higher rate than in Portland.
The article was written in response to “Dropouts in public schools in Portland an entrenched pattern,” which asks how “Portland residents have quietly tolerated the lifelong harm done to thousands of its young people each year,” with only 53 percent of Portland’s high school students graduating in four years – a rate 10 percentage points below New York City’s high school graduation rate.
