Only about 70 percent of high school freshmen go on to graduate, the White House says.
The Obama administration is offering a $900 million carrot to the nation’s school systems to tackle what many view as an abysmal dropout rate that threatens America’s ability to compete in the new global economy. But it’s the “stick” portion of the administration’s plan that has rankled many educators.
Districts would get the money only if they agree to one of four plans to dramatically change or even shut down their worst performing schools. One of these plans involves firing the principal and at least half of the staff members at a struggling school—a turnaround plan that captured national attention when it was tried by the Central Falls, R.I., school system last week.
President Obama took aim at the nation’s school dropout epidemic in a March 1 speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. During the event—which was sponsored by the America’s Promise Alliance, a youth-oriented organization founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife, Alma—Obama noted the economic impact that dropouts have on America’s ability to compete.
The White House says 1.2 million students drop out of school each year, and only about 70 percent of entering high school freshmen go on to graduate. The problem affects blacks and Latinos at particularly high rates. About 2,000 high schools turn out half of all dropouts, and the administration says it will work with states to identify those schools with graduation rates below 60 percent.
Obama described the crisis as one that hurts individual kids and the nation as a whole, shattering dreams and undermining an already hurting economy.
“There’s got to be a sense of accountability,” Obama said in announcing his latest get-tough school proposal. The president’s plan would seek to help 5,000 of the nation’s lowest-performing schools over the next five years.
“In this kind of knowledge economy, giving up on your education and dropping out of school means not only giving up on your future, but it’s also giving up on your family’s future,” Obama said. “It’s giving up on your country.”
Obama has been pushing schools—using federal money as his leverage—to raise their standards and prod them to get more children ready for college or work. It is a task that former President George W. Bush and Congress, along with many leaders before them, have long taken on, but the challenge is steep.
Obama’s 2011 budget proposal includes $900 million for School Turnaround Grants. To get a share of the money, states and school districts must adopt one of four approaches to fix their lowest-performing schools:
• Turnaround Model: The school district must replace the principal and at least half of the school staff, adopt a new governance structure for the school, and implement a new or revised instructional program.
• Restart Model: The school district must close and reopen the school under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization or an educational management organization. A restarted school would be required to enroll, within the grades it serves, former students who wish to attend.
• School Closure: The school district must close the failing school and enroll the students in other, higher-achieving schools in the district.
• Transformational Model: The school must address four areas, including teacher effectiveness, instruction, learning and teacher planning time, and operational flexibility.
The administration also is putting $50 million into dropout prevention strategies, including personalized and individual instruction and support to keep students engaged in learning, and better use of data to identify students at risk of failure and to help them with the transition to high school and college.
But it’s the four models for turning around chronically underperforming schools that have garnered the most attention, especially after the Central Falls, R.I., school board voted to fire 88 teachers and other staff members at Central Falls High School at year’s end.
I am a School Advisory Council member. We advise nothing. We are eye candy for the law. We make no impact on the way business is done at the school. The law says the parents have the right to see the curriculum and the material before their student takes the course. Can’t ever happen, as the district will not provide an appointment to view. The teachers in middle school have stated “if your child doesn’t get it when I present it to the class, it is not my problem to see that he does, it is the child’s and your problem to see that he gets it”. No curriculum, no class lessons, how do we know what he isn’t getting? Get the point? It is not the teacher’s responsibility to see that their students are getting the knowledge. They don’t have the time (their statment) to remediate any student. They have to push on and close that year. Too bad for the kids that did not follow the lesson or did not have the base knowledge from previous years. That is what is also wrong with education and why kids drop out. Also I agree that we are forcing courses to make every child think they have to go to college. Hey Gates give away all that money and enroll in college again! We are making it where a college diploma doesnt’ really mean what it used to. We flood the system with unprepared and underfunded students that can not stay the course. Good business for the colleges, bad for the students and the economy.
I think President Obama and Educational Secretary Arne Duncan are missing the boat on this issue. Students who want to learn do. Students who want to succeed do. The problem is–very few want to learn and very few want to succeed. It’s too much work.
Students are becoming lazy. They don’t want to work. They don’t want to worry about learning. They will worry about that later. Whether this is a societal issue or a nutritional issue–I don’t know.
I have taught school for twenty-six years and I can honestly say I work harder now than I did when I started. In fact, every teacher around me works hard. Why? Teachers are the ultimate learners. Most teachers I know just love to learn. We want to instill that love of learning in our students. I teach junior high and I go to school each morning for those students who still want to learn. When their eyes light up with curiosity, my day is made.
In Ohio, kids spend 180 days a year in school–less than eight hours a day–and that’s if they have perfect attendance. More than 80% of their lives is spent OUTSIDE of school. The time spent outside of school is coloring their judgement of what they want to do. Television, internet, parents, and friends, all have more influence on these kids than their schools do.
You can turnaround, restart, close or transform as many schools as you want to, but I bet my dwindling retirement package that it won’t solve the problem.
Yes, the high school dropout rate is pretty steady at about 30%. But the college drop out rate is 50-60% depending on your source. The high school drop out may wind up on unemployment or in a low paying job at WalMart. The college dropout may wind up on unemployment or a low paying job at WalMart. The difference is that the high school drop-out will not be $10,000 in debt with a very bad credit rating, and will have 4 years of seniority over the student who dropped out after his sophomore year of college instead of his sophomore year in high school. The average kid knows that he or she will never be a scholar and that all high school courses are designed to be a step to college. There are no courses left to prepare you for a non-college future. If you wait to graduate from high school, you are losing 2 years of income (even if it is very low). The current HS curriculum is aimed at learning stuff that you can find on Google in a manner of minutes whenever you want. What’s wrong with creating high schools that help students learn what they want to learn instead of things to get a good score on some college entrance exam.
“Yes, we need to have hard classes with high expectations but we need to help all students succeed and because a student would rather choose a trade or technical college, this should not be upsetting. It does not mean standards are being lowered.’
I agree essentially with this, but we need to examine our own values and perceptions about ‘academic’ classes which we see as hard classes with high expectations, and trade and technical classes which by contrast and placement in polarity with the former are seen as less demanding, easier, and therefore for the less ’smart’ students. Also, notice how we say ‘career’ for academically based work, and ‘jobs’ for those who come through the trade and vocational schools. We say education for the former and training for the latter. Schools, counselors, parents … we all perpetuate this mindset. Little wonder that kids see trade/vocational schools as lower rung, and a sign of failure to go to college.
And yet, the knowledge economy requires not a very different integration of the academic and technical areas of life. Nations that are ahead of the curve like Singapore, the Scandinavian nations who are leaders of innovation have found ways to decrease the polarity between traditional college courses and these so-called vocational courses.
If we can re-think how we see college and the alternatives to traditional college, maybe we will see better how to adequately prepare students to succeed in high school so that they go on to the path in further education that is congruent with their talents and passions.
The standard American response any more to any problem is blame and punishment. It matters little that the causes of drop-out rates are not limited to schools, that as a culture we only pay lip service to the value of education while instead we set schools up to fail and then express surprise and dismay when that’s the actual result. Then we get the buck-shot response, because then politicians look like they care and like they’re doing something. The reality is that white uppper and middle class Americans continue to turn a blind eye to the impoverished, dangerous buildings in which we warehouse children of color and poverty, and then jump on the “it’s the fault of the teachers” bandwagon whenever a politician toots that horn. If Arne Duncan and Barack Obama really wanted to do something about the failure and drop-out rate, they’d start by bull-dozing the decaying, molding, overcrowded and dangerous schools of the inner cities, and they would direct some of the billions they are so willing to lavish on Wall Street or on “exporting democracy” on the children of this country. But no, all we get is more of the same anti-teacher posturing that we saw througout the Bush administration.
What with No Child Left Behind leaving everybody behind, we threw out Bush and company, expecting the kind of reform that Obama now wants in low-performing schools. What we got was “rebranding” NCLB into Race to the Top, with all the same components – testing, knowledge-based standards, anti-union bias, and charter school preference. If it didn’t work at the presidential level who, why, and how could we expect it to work in some local elementary school!
Hmmm…it seems that simply firing principals and staff and closing schools with high dropout rates is a bit like firing the doctors and staffs and closing acute care medical facilities because the death rate is higher than the general population or pediatric facilities. The dropout problem doesn’t start in the high schools. Focusing solely on where the late stage symptoms present themselves, and carrying out massively invasive procedures may help some students, but as a strategy for addressing the root causes it won’t solve most of the problem. There needs to be support, resources AND accountability at the middle level if changes are to be made and sustained at the high school. Recent reports from ACT (The Forgotten Middle), NASSP (Breaking Ranks in the Middle), NMSA (This We Believe 2010), and Maine’s DOE (Bright Futures) all indicate that success in the middle is the best predictor of success at the high school. So, where’s the support for effective middle level practices and programs?
Really, every student does not need to be forced to take college preparatory classes in high school. There definitely should be Honors, Advanced Placement Courses offered in all subjects for those students who wish to take these courses to help prepare for college. There should be a standards college prep course to follow, however, we still need to have a tech prep course list–that will count towards graduation. There are students who could participate in a woodworking class and eventually become a master carpenter that I would love to hire to work on my home or a mechanic or a hair stylist or a LPN—really folks pretending to have super high standards and pretending that every student will or needs to pass Calculus is ridiculous and forcing all students into these higher level classes to say we have upped our standards is crazy. Yes, we need to have hard classes with high expectations but we need to help all students succeed and because a student would rather choose a trade or technical college, this should not be upsetting. It does not mean standards are being lowered. The tech prep courses should be made available. Are some kids who should take hard classes going to want to take these course–probably but if their plans include college after graduation, their counselors should advise otherwise. Many students drop out because they are failing–some due to laziness but some due to not being served with classes they see as valuable to their future.
Once again the responsibility falls to school districts when it should fall to parents and students as well. When parents see no need to accept responsbility for their and their student’s behavior, when gangs and welfare pay better that introductory jobs and are more important than being in school, on time, ready to learn, then all the money in the world thrown at the problem isn’t going to be overcome by anything the educational system can do. You can close low performing schools, but sending some of the students, particularly in large cities where the inner city schools are the low performing schools, I think will cause as big an epidemic of “white flight” (or this time let’s call it educated flight because those parents of any color whose students are doing well are going to see that their students continue to do well) as in the 50s. Parents who are concerned about their students educations do not want them consorting with students(?) who come to school with no interest in anything but how much disruption they can cause. Students from those situations who truly want to learn are going to be penalized simply because of where they come from. Many of those students need serious remediation in reading, language, math, and socialization. Simply throwing them in to see if they can swim isn’t going to lower the dropout rate. There’s got to be more thought put into the process. Simply firing teachers, many of whom are doing good jobs under extremely trying conditions, is not the best plan. There is a teacher/administrator shortage already. What is going to happen when you increase it?
While there should be continued efforts to improve our nation’s high schools, focusing only on high schools in a punitive manner is literally closing the barn door after many of the occupants have either left or pretty much decided to leave. If the administration wants to impact future dropout rates there needs to be resources, support, and accountability for effective middle level practices as well as high school reform. One of the key predictors of high school performance is…performance in the middle grades. We don’t need middle schools that prepare students for failing high schools. We need middle schools that prepare student to be successful in reformed high schools, college, and beyond. And I do wonder…are there educators at the table when legislation and policies are developed?
It is both interesting and troubling that educators feel that there is insufficient time to discuss STEM-related careers. We are not asking educators to spend inordinate amounts of time discussing STEM-related opportunities. Open rhetoric about the wealth of varied opportunities that exist for those with STEM-related knowledge and skills only need occur perhaps 5-10 minutes PER WEEK. Teachers DON’T have to discuss the entire STEM field in a one session. Each week they could spend a few minutes talking about 1-2 professions: accountants, engineers, computer programmers, etc. etc. and why STEM-related skill are important to those fields. By creating a RECURRING forum for constructive discussion about careers (STEM and otherwise), students’ awareness and attitudes will be positively impacted. No one is suggesting that everyone can work in STEM-related fields, but we are absolutely negligent and remiss in our duties as parents, educators and professionals if we continue to downplay and ignore the very real opportunities that exist in STEM-related fields and the stakes for them personally and for our nation.
On the one hand, the Obama plan wants to have more effective teachers teach in troubled schools. On the other, they propose plans to fire troubled school staff. What effective teachers would choose to teach at a school they might eventually get fired from?
As usual, the true cause of kids dropping out of high school is ignored in favor of wialing on high schools and teachers. Coming into high school totally unprepared for high school level work is cause number 1. Cause number 2 derives from this underpreparation: remediation takes time, staff, and commitment by the student. Kids do not percieve this as relevant to their lives….time to them is rigjht now, this minute, and no later. They are unwilling to make the effort it takes to catch up and move on. Cause number 3 is a society that places value on material things, personal appearance, and big fun. Enough said about that. However, I will say this, after a long career in education, I am ging to be happy to retire in June,, and devote my time to helping home school my grandchildren. Public education is Ameirca is broken, and the administration (s) keep tryiing to use bandaids when clearly, major surgery is needed. No gain will ever happen until all the sacred cows of public education are ground into hamburger. I think I can speak for many of hus in education: we are sick to death of being blamed, and not allowed at the table when plans are being made. The ultimate losers are our kids, when teachers spend more time on usdeless paperwork than on classroom teaching.
It strikes me the this program should have little controversy and should be applauded by educators. The program provides good serious alternative action approaches to address dire educational results that affect children’s whole lives and neither dictates how each case should be handled nor singles out indiscriminately teachers or administrators.
While the community shares in the responsibility for educational success, the educators are paid professionals to find the solutions which are available, for example: Harlem Children’s Zone and Harlem Village Academies.