Introduction

Federal and state education systems are being decentralized in favor of independent public Charter Schools, for instance, Maryland has joined more than 40 states and the District of Columbia to enact a Public Charter School law. This law allows parents, teachers, school administrators, community groups and others to start public charter schools. These laws further mandate that states with charter school laws must allocate money to these schools for each student they enroll. These changes were brought about partly because of the high percentage of children who were not graduating from high school. A recent study conducted by Northwestern University of Boston found that 5.5 million young people between the ages of 16-24 are unemployed and undereducated, additionally, the joblessness among out-of-school youths between the ages of 16-24 surged by 12 percent in a single year. The national education-graduating rate climbed in most of the 20th century and peaked in the late 1960s. However, there has been a steady decline since that study as it settled around 70 percent in the last few years according to the Department of Education. Blacks and Latino students faired worse, only about 55 percent of African-American students and 53 percent of Latinos graduates from high school, according to a November 2002 study by the Manhattan Institute. The Gates Foundation started in 1999 by Bill and Melissa Gates, blames this huge ambivalence on impersonal teachers, under-financed high schools that are particularly common in poor minority neighborhoods for the declining graduation rates. Schools are crowded to the point of abnormality, an educator argues, these schools are ill-equipped to reach struggling students before they give up. The New York Times' Bob Herbert, interviewed young unemployed and undereducated Chicagoans in an article "Youth, Jobless, Hopeless". He says that the young people he interviewed didn't have anything in the way of aspirations. Whether boys or girls, men or women, those who he interviewed seemed for the most part defeated. He said, "they didn't talk about finding the perfect job, nor did they talk about being in love and eventually getting married and raising a family. Furthermore, they didn’t express a desire to someday own their own home. He went on to say that there was an absence of positive comments and emotions of any kind. There was a widespread sense of frustration and anger, but most of all sadness".