Dropouts

As a 10th-grader in San Diego, Stephanie Bryson said, she was disenchanted with school, receiving poor grades and contemplating dropping out to become a professional surfer. But she eventually came to see the value of a higher education and entered Cal State Long Beach. In May she graduated summa cum laude and was class valedictorian. Her progression from rebellious teenager to serious scholar didn't stop there: Bryson, now a 23-year-old graduate student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., was recently named a Rhodes Scholar — making her the second Cal State graduate to receive the honor.

An overlooked corner of the dropout problem became more visible Thursday when state officials for the first time released the dropout rate for eighth-graders. Statewide, about 3.5% of eighth-graders — 17,257 in all — left school and didn't return for ninth grade, according to the state count now available with a system for tracking students individually. The California Department of Education released the new dropout and graduation rates, the first such report based on unique identification numbers for every public school student.

What will become of Genesis? There she is, at her school graduation, standing in the sun-stroked courtyard of Ramona Opportunity High School, a beige campus on a dead-end street in East Los Angeles. It's a bare-bones affair but freighted with meaning. A string of balloons lollygags beside a stage. A few families watch from plastic chairs. On a wall someone has taped a piece of paper and scrawled a message: Congrats Ladies. AUDIO SLIDESHOW: Genesis tells her story Moonfaced, 17 and, right now, teary, Genesis Diaz is the student body president.

Here's a familiar fact: Economic inequality is rising in the United States. The rich have gotten richer, the poor have stayed poor, and families in the middle have seen their incomes stagnate. Here's a less-familiar fact: Opportunity in America isn't what it used to be either. Among children born into low-income households, more than two-thirds grow up to earn a below-average income, and only 6% make it all the way up the ladder into the affluent top one-fifth of income earners, according to a study by economists at Washington's Brookings Institution.

One of the smaller line item vetoes made this year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger strikes less than $7 million from the state budget that was earmarked for overseeing a student-tracking database. And it wasn't even state money; it was entirely federal funding, and can't be used for anything else. What was the governor thinking? As he said in his veto message, enough is enough. He was frustrated by the state's failure to quickly and efficiently create a system for gathering useful information about student progress and holding educators accountable.

Chris Haney, a former Canadian journalist whose fascination with entertaining, barely useful tidbits of information led him to co-create the bestselling board game Trivial Pursuit, died Monday in Toronto. He was 59. He had been in poor health the last two years with kidney and circulatory problems, said Scott Abbott, who created the game with Haney more than 30 years ago and watched it become a cultural phenomenon across North America and around the world. "I was the architect and Chris was the general contractor.

High school dropouts, who are more likely to commit crimes than their peers with diplomas, cost the state $1.1 billion annually in law enforcement and victim costs while they are still minors, according to a study that is being released today. The California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara found that cutting the dropout rate in half would prevent 30,000 juvenile crimes and save $550 million every year. Law enforcement officials said the findings highlight why the governor ought to sign legislation, SB 651, which would require the state Department of Education to produce an annual report that accurately calculates the number of students not finishing school.

The gig: Professional comic book writer. Matt Fraction, the 33-year-old author of "Invincible Iron Man" and "Uncanny X-Men" comics for Marvel Entertainment Inc., has a job that's coveted by thousands of boys, not to mention grown men who daydream at their desks. Lately, Fraction's ratcheted his career up a notch by landing a gig to write the script for the upcoming Iron Man 2 video game. It will be published next year by Sega Corp. alongside the debut of the movie sequel.

The dropout rate in the Los Angeles Unified School District declined almost 17% -- welcome news in a school system beleaguered by budget cuts and ongoing battles over future reforms. The dropout rate for the 2007-08 school year came in at 26.4%, down from 31.7% for the previous year and among the largest improvements in the state. L.A. Unified still trails all other large urban school systems in California except Oakland Unified.

Re "High school dropout rate climbs to 34.9%," May 13 The news that the Los Angeles County high school dropout rate is over 1 in 3 means that life will be bleak for these dropouts with few skills, and bleak for the other citizens who will have to support most of them, in our prisons or social net. This is not necessarily a school system problem -- though a little more creativity in approaches might be helpful -- but it is a failure of parents in...