Schools, families and friends are preparing to celebrate the hard work and achievement of students who will graduate from high school in the next month.
They should be proud.
That high school degree should be a bare minimum for public education, a foundation for further study and training. According to Michigan Department of Education reports, only 75 percent of high school students graduate.
Yet, in Michigan, students are required to attend school only until they reach the age of 16. Then, they can - and too many do - drop out for any reason. They're minors, but they don't even need a parent's permission to call it quits with school. It's an antiquated, utterly lax official attitude that dates to a time more than 100 years ago, when strong backs, but not necessarily agile minds, were needed down on the farm.
Michigan needs to get with the times, and enact a law requiring that all public school students attend classes until they graduate high school, or turn 18.
The state House approved two bills this spring that would do just that. The state Senate should follow suit and enact this common-sense legislation. We have no doubt that Gov. Jennifer Granholm would enthusiastically signs them into law; years ago, she called for the state to double its college graduates.
In the meantime, it's good to see that Bay County leaders are banding together in a Youth Dropout Prevention Committee to determine how public and private agencies can help keep students in school until they graduate. Bay County high schools graduate an average 91 percent of their students.
According to state Department of Education reports, for example, Bay City Central High School had 465 ninth-graders enter its doors in 2003. Four years later, in 2007, there were 346 students left - 44 had transferred in, and 163 had transferred to another school or moved out of the district. Officially, just 28 students from the class of 2007 dropped out, leaving Central a graduation rate of 85 percent.
That's still too low. Every student must, at the very least, attain a high school diploma. High school graduates get better jobs and do better in life than those who don't finish.
Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates, a crusader for education, said it best in testimony two years ago before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee: "Every student in America should graduate from high school ready for college, career and life. Every child. No exceptions. Whether they are going off to college or into the work force or a combination of the two, it is the responsibility of public education to give our young people the skills, knowledge and preparation for life they need and deserve."
Michigan should aim for high school graduation of all students, and enact mandatory school attendance until age 18, or graduation.
Our state desperately needs all of the well-educated talent it can get to redesign and retool our recession-wracked economy. It also pays out way too much in welfare and prison costs associated with those who drop out of high school.
Accordingly, the state should make it hurt for dropouts and their parents who turn their backs on Michigan, and give up on the higher earnings and better lives of high school graduates.
Those minors who refuse to finish high school, despite a state requirement, should be enrolled in a job corps to help their communities. Maybe a winter of picking trash off the streets with a sheriff's work crew would convince them that they'd rather stick it out in a nice, warm classroom.
However bored they may be, some parts of some lessons are bound to stick. Or, ideally, education would finally click for them.
A high school diploma should not be an option.
Make that sheepskin - or at least classes until age 18 - mandatory.
For our students, and for our state.