You Have the Right...

...to stay in school till you're 21.



I found this over at the Inside Schools blog. While I'm very liberal, never having voted for a Republican in my life (full disclosure: I did once vote for Randi Weingarten), there are some serious issues with this.

One is that it's often mathematically impossible for such kids to have any chance of graduating. When you have kids with 6 high school credits, 21 years old, there ought to be something more realistic offered to them. Simply having them pass time sitting in classrooms does no service to anyone, particularly when schools like mine are over 250% capacity with class size rules routinely violated.

Now some of these kids are new entries to the United States. Maybe they need extra time to learn English. Maybe some kids were sick and had to miss school for a year. But some of these kids are perpetual screw-ups. And with Mayor Bloomberg's typically enlightened policy of 6-12 schools, that could be particularly problematic. I have a sixth-grade daughter, and I'm not all that keen on having her share the halls with 21-year-old losers who have no interest whatsoever in passing classes.

Should kids have the absolute right to stay till 21?