Is There Something in the Water

In society, having a high school diploma is an expectation and is also an indicator of success later in life. According to the US Census Bureau, individuals without a high school diploma or a General Education Development certificate have lower incomes and higher rates of employment. It does not matter what areas of the state students live whether rural or urban, there are similar characteristics in the students who drop out. Some of the primary reasons for students to leave school are failing classes, substance abuse and low self-esteem. The teens' lives are impacted by social and economic issues also, such as crime, abuse, bullying and teen pregnancy. Is it something in the water that encourages teenagers to dropout of school and to become adults to soon?

According to an article written by Gary Fields titled "The High School Dropout's Economic Ripple Effect," states that there have been new studies showing far fewer students completing high school with diplomas than long believed. One of the studies completed by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center revealed that conventional wisdom had long placed the graduation rate around 85%, there has been a growing consensus emerging that only about seven in 10 students are actually successfully finishing high school." According to the National Campaign to Prevent Pregnancy, the United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortion in the fully industrialized world. The trend of teen births has continually declined but the need to address the issues of teen pregnancy as it pertains to the national dropout rate holds steadfast. This analysis is going to focus on the effects of teen pregnancy and how much of a negative impact on the dropout rate and the family system it has.

In an effort to approach the concern is to use the dropout rates and female teen pregnancy rates as the two variables in a study. The expectation of the study would be to figure out how much of an impact teen pregnancy rates has on dropout rates. According to the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Science there has been a decrease in the dropout rate of female students since 1989. Even with that evidence there is still a concern. Based on the findings of the range, mean and median the expectation would seem higher. The histogram provided displays that information.

Furthermore, the histogram displays the female dropout range is 4.4. The mean calculated the average of data information to be 9.92. The median value is 10.2, and is greater than the mean. Hence the distribution is left skewed with a negative value of -.2586. Since the difference between the mean and median is -.28, the range is -6.36%. Thus showing the bulk of the distribution of data is concentrated on the right of the histogram with a standard deviation value of 1.4226.

In the same manner, the data was placed and displayed on a boxplot which