As a graduate student, I am completing a research study in which I interviewed 20 hard-working first-grade teachers, all committed to their pupils' success.
Meanwhile, quality stagnates, teachers lack morale, teaching is by rote and pupils graduate without basic skills.
Around ten pupils graduate from its three high schools each year.
Like Sunday school pupils, graduates of Changing Lives Through Literature are given a book along with their diploma.
In 2001, only 38% of pupils graduated from high school in four years, compared with an average of 68% for the country as a whole.
Only 24 pupils were graduating when the minimum requirement was 64.
In 1977 it was claimed that about 97 percent of the pupils who graduated from the basic eight-year school continued their education at the secondary level.
Pupils who graduated a few years ago from the schools he studies say the same thing, suggesting behaviour has changed only recently.
In one such school, Thomas Morus, only two or three of the 50 or so pupils who graduate each year find apprenticeships, the stepping-stone to employment for most young Germans.
And it ranks 42nd in the proportion of pupils who graduate (63%, against a national average of 69%).Indeed, it would appear that California, at some point in the past generation, must have decided to disinvest in its children and to reallocate resources to such things as prisons.
By that time, some 500 pupils had graduated from No. 5 EFTS; the wastage rate was just under twenty per cent.
