High drop-out rates

A worrying post from Donald Trump: Shocking Education Statistics. The title says it all, but here is an extract:

…nearly one in three public high school students in the United States won’t graduate. If you break down the statistics for Latinos and African-Americans, the numbers are even worse. The dropout rate is nearly 50 percent.

Bill Gates has also made similar remarks, in his National Education Summit on High Schools speech. If two big names (I’m sure there are more) are sounding an alarm, something is definitely wrong!

Although I’m not American, these stats and warnings make me shiver. As Donald rightly points out, a good educational system underpins the whole of society. For society to keep inventing new things and developing new ideas, we need educated people to feed into science and engineering higher education programs (and this is just a small part of the good effects of a good education).

So what is going wrong and what can we do to fix it?

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