A diploma’s simple math

ARMED WITH THEIR DIPLOMAS, high school graduates make close to three times the money dropouts can earn. Yet in many Los Angeles high schools, up to half of all students quit school without that precious piece of paper. Surely they want to make more than the minimum-wage salaries their ignorance will gain them.

One thing The Times’ recent series on dropouts made clear: As with most intractable problems, there is no “one thing” that makes kids drop out. School failure bundles together a motley collection of problems: lack of qualified math teachers, student apathy and truancy, even illegal immigration. As much as school reformers like to heap blame on the schools, teachers and administrators cannot solve all of these problems.

But they can solve the part that is theirs. High school problems begin long before high school. Students are too often promoted even when they didn’t understand the reading or math lessons from the year before. Not only do they fall further and further behind, until they hit a wall called algebra, but they and their parents come to believe that failure doesn’t really matter. Students can progress without it.

Until, that is, they can’t anymore. There’s a better lesson for students and families: They are accountable, along with the schools. Children who are failing at subtraction or multiplication, who skip class or don’t complete assignments, should be placed without delay in mandatory Saturday or after-school classes, and if that fails, in summer sessions.

Parents would take all this more seriously if they had to meet with school officials each time a key academic rule is flouted. Children, meanwhile, wouldn’t be asked to learn multiplication until they understood addition. They wouldn’t be assigned “Charlotte’s Web” before they could manage Dr. Seuss. And they wouldn’t be so stunned in high school by the full sum of everything they haven’t learned.

New York schools have started such mandatory sessions at key grades, at the insistence of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who governs the city’s schools. Bloomberg also is working to get parents involved in more positive ways, such as the use of parent liaisons. As Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pursues his vision of governing the L.A. schools, these are intriguing possibilities for him and the voters to consider.