When Antwan Wilson, who resigned as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools in February, skirted the local school-lottery system in an ill-fated effort to get his daughter into a top D.C. high school instead of a "low performing" neighborhood school, he exposed a painful truth: Too many public high schools are failing, especially those serving low-income students of color. The chancellor lost his job, but the students in such schools are losing much more. These are the very students who, if they enroll in college, are most likely to drop out before completing degrees.
If we really want to fix the college-completion problem, we need to fix high schools.
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