A DROPOUT FACTORY. Milwaukee Hamilton barely makes the cut. Joanne Jacobs links to ABC News coverage that includes an instructive observation.

Loretta Singletary, 17, enrolled in a GED program after dropping out of a Washington, D.C., high school that she describes as huge, chaotic and violent. "Girls got jumped, boys got jumped, teachers (were) fighting and hitting students," she said.

She said teachers had low expectations for students, which led to dull classes. "They were teaching me stuff I already knew ... basic nouns, simple adjectives."

Singletary said she loved science but wasn't offered it and her complaints to administrators went unanswered. "I was interested in experiments," she said. "I didn't have science in 9th or 10th grade."

A GED classmate of Singletary's is 23-year-old Dontike Miller, who attended and left two D.C. high schools on the dropout factory list. Miller was brought up by a single mother who used drugs, and he said teachers and counselors seemed oblivious to what was going on in his life.

He would have liked for someone to sit him down and say: "You really need to go to class. We're going to work with you. We're going to help you," Miller said. Instead, "I had nobody."

So much for lowered expectations augmenting self-esteem.