West Indian students are dropping out?!?

A little more than a week ago, the Toronto School Board approved - among other measures to improve the academic performance of its black students - an afrocentric secondary school. While this sparked a reasonable debate over the use of public funds in a potentially divisive manner, what jumped out at me was a supporting factum in the Globe and Mail article announcing the decision purporting that West Indian students are dropping out!!

The dropout rate for students of English-speaking Caribbean descent is highest among all groups at 40 per cent compared with 23 per cent for those with Canadian roots. [Emphasis added]

This was highly surprising to me, given that it is acknowldeged, at least in the circles I keep, that students of West Indian descent tend to academically outperform their African-American peers. And don't get me wrong, I am willing to be proven otherwise. But the evidence agrees: The most recent study, this one at U-Penn, comparing college admission rates between the two groups suggests that Afro-West Indians (those educated in the Archipelago and their children educated in North America) have twice the representation at elite US colleges than their proportion of the US population, whereas African-Americans are underrepresented more than 30%. In fact the study shows that the more elite the school, the higher the percentage of that institution's black population is Afro-West Indian, showing not only are they more likely to be accepted, but they're also more likely to and matriculate into these schools (see NY Times article). Another study, at UNC, examining years of schooling and high school completion comes to the same conclusion. And of course, there's anecdotal evidence. My wife Legena was once told by an African-American classmate at Howard University - which by the way is probably the most embodied and tangible nexus of African-America and West Indian-America - "When I get straight A's - I aint doing it to prove it to my professors, I aint doing it to prove it to my momma, heck, I aint even doing it to prove it to myself! It's to show it to the Trinidaydians!" Interesting.

So we get to this article saying West Indian-Canadians are dropping out of high school. So I looked at the studies and wrote to the research department of the school board. Here's what I found:

1. The newspaper report was incorrect. The 40% figure the dropout rate for students born in the English-Speaking Caribbean.
2. These figures are not directly related to race. As we know, a large percentage of the West Indian-Canadian population is actually Indo-West Indian. A recent census of the Toronto high schools confirmed this: 6% of all students had Afro-Caribbean parents, and 3% of the district were students of Indo-Caribbean parents.

What's my point? Firstly, that statistic without more information was misused and has little bearing on the debate for an "africentric" school since it deals with region of birth and neither race or ethnicity But more importantly, our kids are not dropping out of high school. At least not 40% of them. The fact that 40% of English-Speaking Caribbean-born students do not complete Toronto high schools to me says more about their system of academic integration, transfer of credits, and the perceived benefits of improving upon a West Indian education and completing high school in Ontario (which has a higher compulsory age of education than the rest of Canada) than it says anything about academic underachievement.