Punishing Dropouts

Dropouts and gang activity in the state’s high schools are such formidable problems that when someone offers a solution that addresses both, the temptation is to embrace it wholeheartedly--even unthinkingly. We think that is what happened last week, when the California Senate approved a bill that would require every high-school student applying for a driver’s license to prove that he was passing all his courses, meeting the requirements for graduation and staying out of trouble. If a student flunked a course, became a truant or carried a gun or drugs to school, no license.

There’s no question that the bill, the brainchild of Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara), is well-intentioned; Hart, a former high-school teacher, says he wants to “get students to focus on what is most important in their lives--getting a diploma and an education.” The bill was approved and sent to the Assembly despite objections that it would impose white, middle-class standards on the state’s blacks and Latinos. That point seems to us almost racist; nearly half the state’s minority students do drop out before graduation, but not because they lack what it takes to finish high school. Our objections to the bill are more fundamental: We doubt that it could achieve its purposes, however noble, and, if strictly enforced, could make the plight of high-school dropouts even more hopeless.

Linking passing grades to a driver’s license might provide some incentive to stay in school, but only up to a point--that moment, usually soon after a 16th birthday, when a student passes the road test and secures the coveted license. What’s to prevent a student from dropping out of school the very next day? Nothing in this bill. Nor is it likely that the prospect of forgoing a driver’s license would persuade many teen-agers to leave drugs and weapons at home; the same youths who blithely violate criminal statutes aren’t likely to worry about driving without a license.

Students drop out of school for all kinds of reasons--because they’re bored, because they’re attracted to gangs and the street scene, because they lack the basic skills to handle high-school academics, because they become pregnant, because they are so poor that they must work to help support their families. If the Legislature is genuinely concerned about stemming the dropout rate, it ought to grapple with these underlying problems, which defy easy answers.

But denying a driver’s license to a dropout would simply add to the burdens of a youngster who might already have more than his share. Particularly in Southern California, a dropout without a driver’s license is virtually unemployable. The bill contains a hardship provision that would allow a teen-ager to get a license if he dropped out of school for financial or medical reasons, but he would need permission from a Superior or Municipal Court--a step so formidable that we doubt few would take it. Surely the Legislature cannot want to consign dropouts to the unemployment rolls permanently; the Assembly should avoid the Senate’s mistake and reject this legislation.