Until January Ashley Evans seemed to be defying the odds. Unlike 65 percent of New York City's minority youth, the 18-year-old cheerleader was poised to graduate from August Martin High School this June after four years in the Jamaica, Queens school. Evans would have been one of the estimated 120 students to walk across the stage on graduation day.
But during the early morning hours of Jan. 27, Ashley Evans became part of a new set of statistics. Evans and six others ranging in age from 14 to 23 have been charged in connection with murder of 28-year-old Nicole duFresne on the city’s Lower East Side. Evans is being held at Riker’s Island Correctional Facility facing second-degree murder charges. She is among the black and Hispanic youth who comprise 95 percent of the city’s total juvenile inmates, according to the Correctional Association of New York.
A report issued last year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that New York State has the worst overall graduation rates for black and Hispanic minority students. While nationwide 50 percent of minority youth graduate within four years, in New York the figure stands at 35 percent. The report also said that due to discrepancies in reporting, the actual drop-out rate may be even higher.
Jason Blonstein, a professor of urban education at Steinhardt, said there are several causes that can explain New York state’s dropout rate. First, he noted that New York City minority students have a tendency to change school districts several times even before they reach high school. “Students who move from school to school, neighborhood to neighborhood, seeing the world through the lens of poverty and its attendant tendencies toward crime and hopelessness” are more likely to lack adult mentors and role models and oftentimes turn to criminal activity or drugs.
“No school reform effort, particularly the lame attempt at uniformity by the New York City system, aimed at cognitive achievement will affect [this issue],” Blonstein said.
He also cited school class size as a factor. More effective schools, he said, must have smaller class sizes and more extracurricular programs “to compete with the opportunities for sloth and escape outside the school.”
Evans likely had class sizes nearing 35 students, the average at August Martin. Her school averages 13 more students per class than New York state’s average of 22 students, according to the National Education Association.
The Center for Civic Innovation reported that more female than male students graduate within four years, 54 percent to 45 percent. In fact, the school enrollment numbers for women have been steadily increasing according to a January 2005 report by the Community Service Society of New York. While male enrollment dropped by 1.2 percent from 1996 to 2003, females in New York City schools increased their enrollment by 7.1 percent.
The Women In Prison Project reported that from 2002 to 2003, the number of female prisoners nationwide rose by 6.3 percent, nearly double the increase by men. Many of these women were, like Evans, of high school age. The National Criminal Reference Service reported that in 2003, 20.4 percent of all females arrested were juveniles.
The Women In Prison Project noted that of among incarcerated women, more than 60 percent lack a high school diploma and only 44 percent can read above an eighth grade level.
“By no means do all dropouts commit crimes, but crime is often an outcome of marginalization and dropouts have been marginalized.”
Professor Pedro Noguera of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education said that he believes while there is a correlation between drop-out rates and the rate of incarceration, the connection may not be so clear until a student is several years removed from his or her high school environment. When women drop out of high school, their first goal is generally to find employment, he said. This search is often a deterrent to crime. Minority women, however, have more difficulty than both white women and minority men in obtaining jobs. According to the Community Service Society, less than 50 percent of minority women under the age of 24 are employed.
Once their efforts to find a job appear to have failed, Noguera said that women can turn to crime as a solution. The Community Service Society report, titled “Out of School, Out of Work…Out of Luck?” noted that the rate of disconnected minority youth, those under the age of 24 who are neither working nor enrolled in school, is also increasing.
Joseph McDonald, dean of New York University’s School of Education, said that in addition to the lack of employment, women who drop out oftentimes feel marginalized. “By no means do all dropouts commit crimes, but crime is often an outcome of marginalization and dropouts have been marginalized,” he said.
For the first time in nearly a decade, the Community Service Society noted that the overall dropout rates among minorities in the city are beginning to increase. Ashley Evans’ school had, in the last two years, seen a five percent decrease in the number of students graduating in four years. Both Blonstein and Noguera both said that without the necessary outreach programs and improved public schools, minority rates of graduation will continue to decrease.
Blonstein said that the most significant factors for improvement are more personal connections between students and teachers and a more focused effort to reach out to and keep track of students on the road to dropping out. “Minority kids are so isolated from the mainstream society, and therefore do not strive to be part of it in large numbers,” said Blonstein. “So all the little efforts like Tiger Woods' golf for kids, chess clubs, reading circles, Principal for a Day, need to be expanded. And an expectation of joining the larger society, as a change agent or as a maintainer of it, needs to be built from school-based experiences.”