Florida Senate Bill 1238 proposed that the mandatory attendance age for school should be raised from 16 to 18. It turns out that Florida lawmakers do have some sense; the bill was killed on May 5. We’re hoping their logic behind not passing the bill runs somewhere along the lines of: if you really don’t want to be here, then go home.

Is it a coincidence that the state with the lowest graduation rate, Oregon, with a high school completion rate of about 75 percent, also requires students to attend school until they are 18? We think not. Compare Oregon with Maryland, a state with a high school completion rate hovering around 94 percent and a mandatory attendance age of only 16, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

What this probably means is that the students who would have dropped out are forced to stay in school, but most of them still don’t graduate. Instead they are deadweight, filling up classrooms but absorbing none of the classroom lectures, while penalizing the students who actually attend school to learn.

Senate Bill 1238 was probably proposed with good intentions; it would force students to reevaluate their priorities. But the statistics just don’t match up. Schools with higher mandatory attendance ages tend to have lower graduation rates. Why? Because most students who drop out of high school really don’t care about school at all. The decision to drop out is a big one. To forgo a free education in favor of working at the local McDonald’s is a decision most of us cannot comprehend.

Yes, this is a generalization. Not all students quit school in order to pursue a life as a fry cook. Some students’ motivation lies in that they want to help their families who are struggling from paycheck to paycheck, and the only way to help is to get a full-time job. In this case, their priorities are in order, and the proposed change would have hurt both them and their loved ones.

There are other students who drop out because structured education just does not suit them. They would benefit more with vocational training or going straight into the workforce.

Why does the fact that the Florida Senate would even consider a bill like the one proposed scare us? The bill disregarded the people, other than the potential dropouts, who would have been affected by the change, the people who matter most. Requiring all students to attend school until 18 would increase the junior and senior classes by up to 20 percent, given that 20 percent of 16 or 17 year olds would have dropped out.

With the current state of overcrowding in Florida schools, this would be 20 percent more than schools would be able to house. Not to mention many of the seats would be filled with disruptive students. California raised the mandatory school attendance age to 18 and had such an increase in disruptive students that it had to create separate schools just to deal with them.

By raising the mandatory attendance age, eager learners would be forced to compete with more students to gain a teacher’s attention. Teachers would be burdened with lackadaisical students who couldn’t care less about school and would therefore reflect poorly on the teacher. And lastly, taxpayers would be burdened with higher taxes to make room for students who, in most cases, would rather be anywhere else than in the school the taxes would pay for.

The 17 states with a mandatory attendance age of 18 should follow Florida’s example and reject that poor idea. Floridians should protest any legislation resembling Bill 1238 that might be considered in the future. Florida senators should be commended for having the wisdom to rebuff bill with so many negative repercussions.