Bettering the Odds for Young Black Men - washingtonpost.com: Kelvin James said nobody cared whether he stayed in school. So he quit.
'Half the time when I went to school, I wasn't going on time,' said James, 19, of Forestville. He left Crossland High School in Temple Hills as a senior. 'Sometimes I would stay in class and go to sleep. Other times, I would just go get in my car and leave.'
Like James, who is black, more than 50 percent of black males nationwide do not graduate with their class each year, according to a recent study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
In Maryland, 46 percent of black male students dropped out during the 2003-04 school year, the year rates were analyzed for the Schott Foundation report.
Prince George's and Montgomery counties are credited with success at retaining black male students, even though more than a third of the black males in each jurisdiction dropped out -- 39 percent in Prince George's and 36 percent in Montgomery, the report showed. The study did not include statistics on other suburban Maryland school districts. The Maryland jurisdiction with the lowest graduation rate for black males was the City of Baltimore, where 69 percent of them dropped out, the report said.
