The commercial below, produced by a partnership between State Farm and the NBA, shows what might happen to a sleepy African American teenager reluctant to get up and go to school. If he sleeps in too late too many times, the narrator warns, he may end up homeless: “Every 26 seconds, a kid drops out of high school.”
Ted P., who sent in the ad, remarks that it manages to completely erase the structural reasons why a teenager may drop out of school, reducing dropping out to a decision that a (lazy?) teenager makes. Ted writes:
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.All the issues related to why there is such a high dropout rate are ignored: the lack of jobs, the hopelessness of life in the ghetto, the collapsing state of education in the inner-cities. On top of that, the black male shown in the video seems to be from a rather middle class background… all of it seems to pin the fault on the individual student rather than the system itself.
