Costs to Society : Dropout Not the Only One Who Pays

NEW ORLEANS —  At 15, Robert LeBlanc didn’t know exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up, but like many youngsters his age, he figured he would be something special.

Maybe he would be a musician, he thought. He liked the piano and organ, and he practiced them both diligently. Friends, relatives and instructors who admired his drawing skills thought he might become a commercial artist, a draftsman or even an architect.

What LeBlanc never guessed was that two years later he would drop out of high school. Nor did he suspect that shortly after he left school he would spend 25 months behind bars for burglary and trespassing. But most of all, LeBlanc never imagined that when he reached manhood at 21, he would be lucky just to get a job as a sacker at a New Orleans area supermarket at $3.75 an hour.

“I don’t know what to do. I’m lost. I’m a nobody--that’s what everybody thinks, anyway,” LeBlanc said.

Every day, government officials, business leaders and sociologists say, millions upon millions of high school dropouts stand just where LeBlanc is now, struggling for a toehold in a changing society while the room for them grows smaller and smaller.

Theirs are personal stories of bleak prospects. Like LeBlanc, government studies show, these dropouts will shuffle between low-paying jobs and unemployment. They will be twice as likely as graduates to end up behind bars. For female dropouts--mostly unwed mothers--welfare dependency awaits.

Nation’s Future

But sociologists, academicians and business leaders warn that the story of Robert LeBlanc and his peers is far more than individual tragedy. Their future is the nation’s future, they say.

As its dropout rate continues to hover at 30%, the United States is reaping a labor pool in which nearly half of its new work force is educationally deficient. At the same time, a changing economy is putting a premium on reading, math and thinking skills.

Consequently, business leaders are hard pressed to find workers, and American business is spending $30 billion a year training employees in reading and math skills that they should have received in high school.

There are monetary costs to society as well. Experts estimate that the dropouts in each year’s class represent both an increasing welfare burden and, over their lifetimes, $240 billion in lost tax revenues. Meanwhile, prison incarcerations have shot up dramatically, nearly doubling in 10 years.

If the problem of high school dropouts and a faltering educational system is not met head on, it is not just individuals but the entire nation that is at risk, said David P. Gardner, president of the University of California system and head of a blue-ribbon panel studying the issue.

“The task must be faced and the price must be paid,” Gardner said. “We are out of alternatives.”

Robert LeBlanc’s troubles and the dilemma he presents for New Orleans and Louisiana represent a drama being played out across America.

LeBlanc left high school in the 12th grade with a spotty academic record.

“I dropped out because I was doing terrible in school,” he said. “I was sleeping in class. I used to hardly ever study.”

His biggest problem was reading--the school system never succeeded in teaching him to master it.

“I can’t understand what I’m reading,” he said. “I don’t remember it. Just to get my driver’s license I had to read the book about 15 times.”

Consequently, he failed English five years in a row, and three times he went to summer school to make up credit.

Before he left school, LeBlanc also got into trouble with the law. When he was 17, a girl he knew let him into her uncle’s house and suggested that he take $170 in cash and give her a share later. He was caught two days later and charged with burglary. Already doing poorly in school and now facing a trial with the possibility of spending two years in prison, he decided that trying to go on was pointless.

Like dropouts across the country, LeBlanc waded into the work force with few skills. He was already working at a fast-food restaurant as a short order cook for minimum wage, but shortly after he left school the job disappeared when the company was sold. He landed a job at McDonald’s but, after a week, he quit. He had made only $8 in his first week because of short hours, he said, and the manager couldn’t promise much more.

In court, LeBlanc got some good news. He was given three years probation. But as he applied for job after job, he discovered that almost nobody wanted him.

Across the nation, business and government leaders say that as the nation moves toward a more technical society, there is little room for high school dropouts.

“The problem now is that we have a greater need for graduates than we ever had before,” said Sally Hayes, head of the education committee for the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce. “In order to be able to function competitively, they have to be able to think, they have to be able to problem solve. This is a different set of skills.”

In a recent report, the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based think tank specializing in public policy issues, forecast that by the 1990s, more than half of all new jobs will require some education beyond high school.

Business leaders are already complaining that today even those who are graduated from high school are deficient in the skills needed in the new economy. High school dropouts, they say, are so far off the mark as to drop almost totally from consideration.

One example of just how far off the mark those graduates are is the National Education Assessment Test given last year to 21- to 25-year-olds. A score of 300 on the literacy portion indicates an ability to follow directions to travel from one location to another. Seventy-eight percent of dropouts failed. A score of 300 on the math portion indicates the ability to enter deposits and checks and balance a checkbook. Seventy-nine percent of dropouts failed.

“It’s tough for these kids,” said Karen Evans, acting supervisor at the West Bank Training Center, a federally funded job training operation just outside of New Orleans. “They come in reading at the fifth- and sixth-grade level and they’re competing with adults who are out of work. And there aren’t enough blue-collar jobs that pay $7, $8, $10 an hour. They just don’t exist. They’re looking at jobs that pay minimum wage, and sometimes they are part-time jobs.

“A lot of time, our time is spent in ‘reality therapy.’ They say: ‘I want a job making $5 an hour.’ Kids tell us: ‘Nobody can live on $3.35 an hour.’ Our response is: ‘Take a look: this is what the real world is like.’ We say: ‘What can you do that somebody is going to pay you more than $3.35 an hour for?’

“At first, they’re shocked. They look at us like ‘what are you talking about?’ The kids come in and think that--they’ve worked on their cars at home--they can get a job as a mechanic. They discover that even to do minor tuneups, you have to be able to read a computer printout. It takes more literacy. Nobody is going to let you work on their $15,000 car if you haven’t had some experience and training.”

Before many of those dropouts get to Evans, they have been to the office of Regina Roat, employment manager for Hyatt Regency in New Orleans.

“Seventy percent of the people who come through this office haven’t graduated from high school,” said Roat, whose office hires hourly employees--the reservation clerks, PBX operators, housekeepers, stewards, cooks, waiters, waitresses, and cashiers who make up 90% of the hotel’s staff.

“It’s frustrating. I have people come in and fill out a job application and they have someone with them to help them fill it out. I spend a lot of time when I’m interviewing just filling in the blanks. I expect that, to a degree, because these are low-paying, hourly jobs, but not to the severity that it is here. I can’t hire someone who can’t speak and who can’t read and write, and I get a lot of those.”

Many Applications

Consequently, Roat said she finds herself wading through a stack of applicants to fill one simple job.

“I probably interview at least 30 people for one desk position, probably 15 for a housekeeper. I had a lady who came in who was perfect for a waitress position in our deli. She was bubbly, she was clean. She had to be able to read to take orders and ring things up. She told me she couldn’t work in the deli because she couldn’t read and write.”

Other New Orleans companies report similar situations. Chevron, for instance, is looking for operations and maintenance personnel at its New Orleans facility.

“A lot of them have a hard time passing the basic reading, writing and arithmetic test,” said Chris Lardge, manager of employment in Chevron’s San Francisco headquarters. “They have a lot of people lined up per job, but they whittle them down quickly because a lot of them can’t read instructions clearly and understand what they’re reading, and write things, and they have some problems with basic mathematics. It’s true across the country, in our Richmond refinery, our Philadelphia refinery. I was down in Pascagoula, Miss., and they were saying the same thing.”

New York Telephone Co. reports that in a six-month period in 1987, 84% of its job applicants failed the entry-level examination. Only 20% of job applicants at Motorola could pass a simple seventh-grade test of English comprehension or fifth-grade mathematics test.

Aside from skills, dropouts present “an attitudinal problem,” said Hugh Farrabaugh, human resources director for Martin Marietta in New Orleans.

“They lack the discipline and commitment to operate within a structure,” he said. “They have difficulty assimilating into an industrial structural environment.”

And as industry moves toward high technology, even workers now on the job seem to lack the educational skills to handle more automated tasks. What many companies are finding is what Motorola Inc. Vice President Carlton Braun told the congressional Joint Economic Committee last April.

“We have found to our disappointment that many workers are not prepared to operate the factory of the present, much less of the future,” he said.

At Martin Marietta, makers of booster rockets for the space shuttle, officials are wrestling with how to move a work force toward more advanced technology.

“Our intent is to get more automated,” Farrabaugh said. “As we become more automated and upgrade our capability . . . we may have to get training in computer literacy. Technical vocabulary is a problem. Computation skills are not what we like them to be. Presently, the company is trying to figure out at what grade level should it write new training and instruction material.

“We want to write the documents to an acceptable level, but not to a third-grade level,” he said.

Robert LeBlanc eventually landed a job at a Burger King. That lasted three days. He was arrested atop a building near his home one night after work and charged with burglary. Already on probation, he spent six months in jail before pleading guilty to a reduced charge of criminal trespassing--a misdemeanor. After his release, he found a job as a busboy at a local country club. But, on the day before he got his first paycheck, his probation on the original burglary charge was revoked because of the misdemeanor conviction. He was sent to Jefferson Parish Prison for 19 months.

There he found lots of people like himself.

“From what we’re seeing, they drop out of school and end up in juvenile institutions and in prison,” said Martha Jumonville, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. “Many of them don’t have the ability to read or write above the fifth-grade level, can’t fill out a job application.”

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 62% of the nation’s prison inmates in 1986 were high school dropouts. That was up from 53% just seven years earlier. The median education level has declined from 11 years of schooling in 1979 to 10 years in 1986.

Incarcerations Up

Meanwhile, incarcerations have shot up. In California, for example, in 1980, 103 people out of every 100,000 were behind bars. Last year, the figure had more than doubled to 239 out of 100,000.

Prison was a rude awakening for LeBlanc.

“I don’t want to go back there,” he said. “That’s why I need to get a job to keep my mind on work.” In prison, he found, “You don’t do nothing, you don’t see nothing, you don’t go nowhere. It’s just nothing. They feed you cold food. They treat you like dogs. I got into a lot of fights. You have to fight to survive. I thought I’d never get out.”

When most inmates finally make it out, they end up back on the streets with the same educational inadequacies. It is little surprise to prison officials that they soon return to jail.

“If, by reason of not having the ability or having a skill and education, an inmate cannot go out and sell himself, then he can’t find a job--that is, a non-skilled, non-reading job,” said Tony Travisano, executive director of American Correctional Assn., the professional organization that represents various correctional groups around the United States. In that case, Travisano said, he is likely to return to crime--”He’s going to get his bread from some place.”

Nationally, 63% of prison inmates are back behind bars within six months after release. In an attempt to deal with that problem in Louisiana, state legislation has been introduced that would require inmates to be able to read and write before becoming eligible for parole.

“If you do get out, what are you going to do if you don’t have the skills to get a job?” Jumonville asked. “You need to have something to keep you from going back to the crime that you committed. If you can’t read, can’t write, chances are you’re going to wind up back in prison.”

New Orleans Judge Miriam Waltzer has watched them trudge through her courtroom. A year ago, she said: “I just got sick and tired of seeing people who can’t read.” So she instituted a program of sentencing people to earn their high school graduation equivalency degree.

Once a week her courtroom is turned into a classroom. The rule is simple: show up for class or go to jail.

“They would plead guilty and there is a form they have to fill out,” Waltzer said. “I’d ask them to read the first paragraph of a form they have to fill out and they would say I forgot my glasses. I’d ask them what ‘waive your rights’ means and they would say waive would mean wave your hand.

“It got to me how many were out there who were not able to read anything, not even the instructions on a box. I think if we’re successful with what we’re trying to do, that we save the state a lot of money.”

LeBlanc got his general equivalency degree while in prison. After his release, he headed for the West Bank Training Center and, with the help of a job placement agency, landed a job at minimum wage, 25 miles from his home. That lasted one day. Without a car or transportation, he says, he couldn’t get there.

For the three weeks after that, he looked for jobs sporadically, sometimes staying at his mother’s home, sometimes at his father’s house, and occasionally spending the night with a cousin who owns a local lounge. During the day, he idled away his time.

One day recently, LeBlanc sat at his mother’s kitchen table bemoaning his fate.

“I sit around. I straighten up around the house for a while. I go talk to my father. I go talk to my grandma or just hang around with one of my brothers. Shoot pool on Wednesday nights and sometimes I go to my cousin’s lounge.

“Seems like every step I take I run into a locked door. Now my girlfriend is starting to talk trash--her daddy says she shouldn’t be with me because I’m a nobody, because I don’t have a job. I’m in a mood like I don’t want to do nothing no more.

“Most of the people, they don’t want nobody like me. They want a dependable person with a car, somebody they can call any time of the day. I’ve got a record, you know.

“I just want to find a job and stay with it and learn things about it. I just want to stay with something and work my way up to be a somebody. I don’t want to be a nobody.”

The very next day, LeBlanc landed his part-time job as a sacker at a local grocery store. But there is a hitch. Because of his prison record, he can’t start work until he produces a letter from the court that says there are no other pending charges against him. In the interim, a family friend has hired him at $25 a day to clean up and help out around his tuxedo shop.

For now, LeBlanc is pleased.

“He’s happy,” his mother, Lynn James, said. “He’s got a little money and he fixed his brother’s car and he’s got that.”

Still it’s a long way from being a musician or a draftsman.

“I’m just hoping that working and getting in a job situation and making money he’ll think about doing something more with his life,” his mother said.