Richard Cohen pens a piece in the WaPo today about a girl in LA who took algebra six times, failed each time, and then dropped out of High School:
I am haunted by Gabriela Ocampo.
Last year, she dropped out of the 12th grade at Birmingham High School in Los Angeles after failing algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it. So, according to the Los Angeles Times, she “gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School.”
Gabriela, this is Richard: There’s life after algebra.
Richard then goes on and says a couple silly things, things which sent PZ Myers ballistic:
That’s Richard Cohen, who is supposedly the ‘liberal’ columnist for the Washington Post, giving advice to a young girl.
It’s outrageous.
Because Richard Cohen is ignorant of elementary mathematics, he can smugly tell a young lady to throw away any chance being a scientist, a technician, a teacher, an accountant; any possibility of contributing to science and technology, of even being able to grasp what she’s doing beyond pushing buttons. It’s Richard Cohen condescendingly telling someone, “You’re as stupid as I am; give up.” And everything he said is completely wrong.
I am not going to excuse Cohen’s glorification of ignorance, if you will, but I do not think that was the real point of the column. The point of the column is that should someone be condemned to a life of, well, diminished earnings and expectations, simply because they are incapable of performing algebra? From the National Center of Secondary Education and Transition:
The number of students in our nation who are not completing school is particularly alarming in today’s society because there are few employment opportunities that pay living wages and benefits for those who have neither completed a high school education nor acquired necessary basic skills. On average, youth who drop out are more likely than others to experience negative outcomes such as unemployment, underemployment, and incarceration. High school dropouts are less likely to be employed than high school graduates (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003). Nearly 80% of individuals in prison do not have a high school diploma (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1995). According to the National Longitudinal Transition Study of special education students, the arrest rates of youth with disabilities who dropped out were significantly higher than for those who had graduated (Wagner et al., 1991). Three to five years after dropping out, the cumulative arrest rate for youth with serious emotional disturbance was 73% (Wagner, 1995).
Students who do not complete school cost taxpayers billions of dollars in lost revenues, welfare, unemployment, crime prevention, and prosecution (Joint Economic Committee, 1991). Approximately 47% of high school dropouts are employed compared to 64% of high school graduates not in college (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995). Students who graduate from high school earn an average of $9,245 more per year than students who do not complete school (Employment Policy Foundation, 2001). In light of the negative consequences of dropout for society and individuals, facilitating school completion for all students must be a priority for educators, administrators, and policymakers across the country.
In short, we know that people who fail to graduate High School will be at greater risk for a whole host of negative future outcomes, most importantly diminished job expectations and financial stability. I think that was more the point of Cohen’s article- that rather than helping this child, we have permanently disabled her with the label of high school dropout- simply because she was not able to pass a math class. I do not think that Richard Cohen was trying to dissuade Gabriela from becoming a scientist, as Myers seems to suggest, as I think her inability to perform basic algebra already precluded that possibility. I think his point was that she now has a wide degree of other professional opportunities permanently closed off to her- even without algebra skills, she may very well have gone on to college and found an intellectual pursuit more fitting to her natural abilities.
That was Richard’s point, I think, and it is one worth considering.
*** Update ***
More here, with this nugget:
Seidel did not appear to make a difference with Gabriela Ocampo. She failed his class in the fall of 2004 — her sixth and final semester of Fs in algebra.
But Gabriela didn’t give Seidel much of a chance; she skipped 62 of 93 days that semester.
After dropping out, Gabriela found a $7-an-hour job at a Subway sandwich shop in Encino. She needed little math because the cash register calculated change. But she discovered the cost of not earning a diploma.
“I don’t want to be there no more,” she said, her eyes watering from raw onions, shortly before she quit to enroll in a training program to become a medical assistant.
Could passing algebra have changed Gabriela’s future? Most educators would say yes.
Algebra, they insist, can mean the difference between menial work and high-level careers. High school students can’t get into most four-year colleges without it. And the U.S. Department of Education says success in algebra II and other higher-level math is strongly associated with college completion.
Missing 62 of 93 days? At this point, my level of sympathy drops to almost nonexistent.
*** Update ***
There are no original thoughts in the blogosphere. Or titles to blog posts, either. Kevin says what I was thinking, essentially, and with a frighteningly similar title.