By Monica Brady-Myerov (WBUR)

LISTEN NOW »

In May, a legislative commission is expected to deliver its recommendations for ways to reduce the school dropout rate. The dropout rate has not improved for a decade. Each day in Massachusetts close to 100 students drop out of school. Gov. Patrick hopes to cut that figure by 25 percent within the next two years.

One measure being considered is raising the legal dropout age from 16 to 18. The idea may sound like a simple solution, but it has many critics.

This GED class in Haverhill is small. Eight students sit at long tables facing the white board. It allows instructor Jeff Reddy time to sit down with students individually. Some instruction begins with basic skills that are usually taught in middle school.

The General Educational Development, or GED, test was created in 1942 for World War II veterans who had not completed high school. But the profile of a GED student has changed since then. In this class, there are many 16 and 17 year olds. Nancy Tariot is in charge of the GED classes those kids attend. 

NANCY TARIOT: When they come in here with their backpacks on and they say they want their GED and I tell them, ‘You know what, this is an adult ed program and we’ll treat you like an adult, which means it’s up to you to do your homework and it’s up to you to study and we don’t do basketball and we don’t do proms.’

Tariot says she counsels young students against leaving school to enter a GED program.

TARIOT:  My personal feeling is they should increase the age at which children are allowed to drop out of school, because a 16 year old is not a good person to be making that kind of decision, but they do.

Raising the mandatory attendance age is expected to be one of the recommendations from the legislature’s dropout commission. There’s little political or research consensus on whether it works to lower the dropout rate.

Gov. Deval Patrick says he’d consider supporting keeping kids in school until they’re 18. State Rep. Marie St. Fleur, who is on the dropout commission, is in favor of raising the age. She says schools statewide lose 91 students a day.

MARIE ST. FLEUR: Maybe it quiets our classroom, but what happens to the lives of those people at the end of the day? And it’s not simply their lives we impact – they will have children — we impact the generations that come from them after that.

And St. Fleur says 16 year olds are not equipped to make a decision that will affect the rest of their lives. But by law, 16 year olds can dropout of school without undergoing an intervention or even getting a signature from a parent. Even a 14 year old can leave school with an employment waiver as long as they work at least six hours a day.  Schools are supposed to conduct exit interviews, but many don’t. 

VANESSA JOHNSON: Once I turned 16 I was like, ‘Finally I’m really not going to school now.’

Vanessa Johnson, who’s now 18, says she left because she was suspended twice and fell far behind her peers. Now, as the mother of a new baby, she wishes she had been forced to stay beyond 16 years old.

JOHNSON: I think they should change that you can drop out when you’re 16 because you’re not an adult yet — you shouldn’t be able to make your own choices whether you should be able to drop out or not at 16.

Supporters of increasing the mandatory attendance age point to a study which suggests that staying in school may also increase students earning potential. It was co-authored by Joshua Angrist, a labor economist at MIT who studies the economics of education. Angrist says when kids are forced to stay in school longer, it pays.

JOSHUA ANGRIST: Each year of schooling  raises your earnings about 10 percent, and that really adds up because if you think about somebody who goes to college and spends a couple years doing something else, they might have 40 years of working life, so that 10 percent higher earnings every year is millions and millions of dollars.

But some critics say the study is outdated because it used census data from decades ago. It might be more applicable to look at the dropout rate in the 19 states that have a compulsory age of 18. The Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy recently looked at those states. Researcher Lisa Famularo says  you would expect them to have lower dropout rates, but they don’t.

LISA FAMULARO: Of the states that have the lowest dropout rates, only five of them have a compulsory age of 18. 

Famularo says the proposal to raise the age in Massachusetts should get careful scrutiny in this difficult budget time.

FAMULARO: I would rather see the state spend its money on implementing programs to help support students, to better engage them in school, than spend money on enforcing a law which is going to throw them back into the environment that is not working for them.

And may not work for the whole classroom. The Massachusetts Teachers Association has not taken a position on the proposal. But many teachers oppose it, including Steven Berbeco, who teaches government and politics at Charlestown High School.

STEVEN BERBECO: You can’t legislate education, you can’t pass a law to make people learn more. Our communities will get better results out of building models that invite students to stay in the classroom rather than passing a law to lock them in the school.

Another teacher says you can use the law to keep a 17 year old in a classroom, but to keep the student focused and learning is a totally different proposition.