The latest statistics regarding high school dropouts from the state’s Department of Education were sobering to say the least. In San Mateo County, one of the most affluent areas in California, nearly one in six teens did not finish high school. The public high school dropout rate was highest among Latino and black youngsters, 24 percent and 36 percent respectively. It was lowest, 5 percent, among Asians. Pacific Islanders had a 21 percent failure rate; whites came in at 10 percent. Ethnic background was just one way to look at the depressing numbers. Economics was another. Generally speaking, students (or former students) tend to struggle in the classroom if they came from relatively poor or uneducated backgrounds. That’s not a new deduction. It’s been well-known for decades. Kids who come from families with academic backgrounds and who live in comfortable surroundings have a leg up in school. Test scores, college admissions and other results verify that thesis. In fact, an ex-University of California admissions officer, a San Mateo High School alum, once noted that one of the most accurate predictors of a successful application to UC was a young person’s ZIP code. Public high schools are always an easy target when the subject of academic failure is broached. You don’t hear much about the raw material, the individual kids and where they are coming from (or, for that matter, their elementary schools, or lack of same). An awful lot of them, especially those who eventually fail in the classroom, start out with their hands tied due to socio-economic and family issues. That doesn’t mean the schools can simply bail on these students. Not at all. But it does mean the challenge to educate them is much tougher. Talk to teachers about the many and varied differences involved in working with youngsters from Hillsborough and East Palo Alto. It’s not the same by any stretch of the imagination. For an instructor, it can be a stark case of apples and oranges. That’s the nature of public schools today in San Mateo County and in other parts of California as well. Like the rest of our society, we are being divided into the haves and the have-nots. And money, along with family education, has a great deal to do with that. It’s not fair. But no one ever said life was fair. Not even close to fair.