Dennis Roler's February 26th 1998 editorial in the Grants Pass Daily Courier, entitled "School drop-outs take dismal path, frustrate society", called our attention to the fact that high school drop-out rates are high (30%) and that someone who doesn't get a high school diploma "...has resigned himself to low paying jobs with little chance for significant advancement." The second of these assertions is a myth. For example, one of our children, who dropped out of school after the 9th grade, is now a biomedical research scientist and former professor of mathematics at an Ivy League university, while another, who dropped out after the 10th grade, is a highly-paid systems analyst working at one of the country's premiere newspapers. It is nevertheless true that the lifetime incomes of high school graduates have historically been higher, on average, than those of school drop-outs.

Roler concluded that the solution to this problem is to increase high school graduation rates in part by augmenting school funding and providing additional inducements for students to remain in school. I believe this to be both a short-sighted and ineffective approach to the issue.

Throwing money at the problem has not worked. While national spending per student has more than tripled in the past forty years, high school drop-out rates have been increasing, as recently revealed by the State Department of Education. Over the same period, scores achieved by high school graduates on standardized tests such as the SAT have fallen by nearly 10%. And the introduction of "innovative" programs, such as "school-to-work", has failed either to stem the increase in high school drop-out rates or to significantly increase student performance.

More importantly, reducing drop-out rates will not solve the underlying problem. The experience of completing high school does not prepare a person for career success and high earnings. It is widely reported that today's employers find the average recent high school graduate to be unqualified to assume a meaningful position in the work world. Yet the majority of these same employers continue to disqualify job applicants who don't have high school diplomas regardless of the applicants' experience or ability to perform the work. It is, to a great extent, these discriminatory hiring practices, not the added training received by high school graduates, that accounts for much of the difference in the earning potential of graduates versus drop-outs. (There are, of course, other factors that contribute to this difference, e.g., the fact that people with below-average intelligence are less capable of completing the requirements for graduation than those more intelligent, and it is their lower intelligence, not their lack of a diploma, that limits their earning ability.)

The state of Oregon has recently realized that demonstrated competence, rather than graduation from high school, is the appropriate measure of educational effectiveness. This is evidenced by its evolving efforts to certify various levels of "mastery", and by its ceasing to count as a high school drop-out someone who obtains a GED, whether or not that person actually left school before graduating.

As the cost of education continues to rise at a rate far exceeding underlying inflation; as educational performance remains essentially flat; and as the high school drop-out rate continues to increase, we should not be asking how to reduce the drop-out rate. Instead, we should be asking questions such as these:

• What can be done to reduce the negative impact on earning capacity of a person's decision not to graduate from high school?
• In view of the state's new certificates of mastery and the added significance of the GED, of what intrinsic value is graduation from high school?
• How can we improve the efficiency of the educational process, at once increasing its effectiveness and reducing its costs?

Here are my answers to these questions:

• Promote the use of competency-based standards in lieu of discriminatory surrogate standards, such as high school diplomas, in the hiring process.
• As the high school diploma has become meaningless as a measure of a person's readiness either for work or higher education, it should be eliminated in favor of highly-specific certificates of mastery.
• Instead of requiring students to spend a certain number of years in school, make the award of certificates dependent only on demonstrated competence. Under this concept, a motivated student would be awarded certificates of mastery whenever he met the competency and experiential standards associated with such certificates, regardless of his age or grade, and whether or not he had ever set foot in a classroom. This would encourage students who valued such certification to learn and do as much as possible as soon as possible, and would, thereby, markedly reduce the school population and the consequent cost of education.

Whether my answers to these questions, or even the questions themselves, are the best ones is not important. What I believe is important is that we address societal problems, of which this is but one example, from a social systems perspective, rather than continuing to constrain our problem-solving approaches to those afforded by existing institutions and practices.