Sec. 2. Findings and purpose
580 words·~3 min read·
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Congress finds the following: Every school day, nearly 7,000 students become dropouts. Annually, that dropout rate results in about 1,200,000 students not graduating from high school with their peers as scheduled. Lacking a high school diploma, those individuals will be far more likely than graduates to spend their lives periodically unemployed, on government assistance, or cycling in and out of the prison system. The average annual income in 2009 was $19,540 for a high school dropout, compared to $27,380 for a high school graduate, a difference of $7,840.
According to a 2011 report by Diploma Counts— about 42 percent of Hispanic students, 43 percent of African-American students, and 46 percent of American Indian students will not graduate on time with a regular high school diploma; and by comparison, 17 percent of Asian students and 22 percent of White students will not graduate as described in subparagraph (A). Among all races and ethnicities, males graduate from high school at a lower rate than their female peers do. Among all students, 68 percent of males and 75 percent of females graduate.
According to a report by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center, one of the most unfortunate destinations for high school dropouts, students, and graduates age 18 to 24 is incarceration in Federal or State prisons or local jails. Since 2000, the number of individuals in the 18 to 24 age group who are incarcerated at the Federal, State, and local levels has risen from about 1,400,000 in 2000 to about 1,600,000 in 2008. Over 475,000 individuals in that age group were incarcerated in 2008, with males accounting for 92.4 percent of all those individuals.
In contrast, only 36,000 women in the same age group (7.6 percent) were incarcerated in 2008. High school graduation rates are significantly lower in school districts with higher percentages of students in poverty, measured as students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunches. According to a 2010 National Center for Education Statistics report, high school students from low-income families drop out of high school at 6 times the rate of their peers from high-income families.
Over half of State parole entrants are not high school graduates, and as many as eleven percent of the entrants have only an eighth grade education or less. The lowest achieving 25 percent of students are 20 times more likely to drop out of high school, compared to the highest achieving 25 percent of students. According to the Department of Labor, each year approximately 650,000 persons are released from Federal and State prisons. Those ex-prisoners do not return to communities evenly distributed across the United States, but rather return disproportionately to high-poverty communities characterized by high rates of joblessness, crime, and drug abuse.
The unemployment rate among ex-prisoners has been estimated to be between 25 and 40 percent. An estimated 19 percent of adults in State prisons are functionally illiterate. Over half of State parole entrants are not high school graduates, and about 11 percent of the entrants have only an eighth grade education or less. It is the purpose of this Act to provide adequate resources for national or regional nonprofit organizations to prevent and reduce the disproportionate incarceration of eligible youth, especially minority youth, and to prepare eligible youth for entry into employment, or education leading to employment, that places participants on a path to economic self-sufficiency and provides opportunities for advancement, by providing a comprehensive set of services that includes job training, education, and support services.