That our national troubles with high school graduation are increasingly in the news is critically important. We should all be disturbed by the latest data from the Alliance for Excellent Education documenting the enormous negative economic impact of the dropout crisis. By some estimates, dropouts cost the nation $200 - $300 billion annually in lost wages and taxes, as well as criminal justice and social service costs. A report just released in California noted that high school dropouts, who are unable to access jobs in the increasingly high-tech economy, cost the state $1.1 billion annually in costs of juvenile crime alone. Author Russell Rumberger argued that dropouts have an immediate impact on public safety as well as the economy. 

But threats of punishments to students, like withholding jobs, as proposed in Texas, will only make matters worse, creating a larger school-to-prison pipeline and perpetuating a downward life spiral. These kinds of solutions assume that students create the dropout problem, rather than the systems in which they go to school. 

A great deal more of the effort around high school graduation in this country in recent years has centered on initiatives to precisely define and measure dropouts than on how to prevent them. Meanwhile, graduation rates have declined further in many states, and entire generations of students have fallen through the cracks, victims of a system that seems to be more focused on punishments for students’ lack of education and poor performance than on strategies and incentives for developing successful school pathways.

To begin to reduce the dropout crisis, we must start focusing on the students themselves, not just the numbers. Across the nation, states have implemented high school exit exams to increase performance and strengthen accountability. But in many cases, such exams have not been used to help at-risk high school students to access the interventions and instruction they need to earn their diplomas. Instead, these tests have often caused significant growth in high school dropout rates. Students who cannot pass the exam after repeated attempts give up or are pushed out. Of all the countries that use high school examination systems, the United States is the only nation that uses them to deny students high school diplomas. 

In the 2008 study Julian Vasquez Heilig and I conducted on accountability efforts in Texas (“Accountability Texas-style: The progress and learning of urban minority students in a high-stakes testing context”, Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis), we found that many schools in “Brazos City” tried to enhance their accountability rankings by developing “creative” ways to keep low-scoring students from taking the state’s 10th grade exam by holding them back in 9th grade and pushing them out by counseling them to GED programs, harsh discipline policies, and fines for absences that caused families to go into debt. Although scores went up, more than 50 percent of the districts’ students failed to progress from 9th to 10th grade where they would need to take the exit exam that would determine school rankings, and only one-third ultimately graduated from high school. What happens to students who are pushed out of the system, and who are then are denied a chance of employment as a result? Society ultimately pays the cost of their failure to get the education and the employment that would allow them to become contributing members of society, which they desperately want to do.  

Instead of merely counting dropouts and tallying test scores, we must address the educational systems and structures that have produced our current dropout woes. Many schools in low-income communities simply do not have the education systems in place to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Schools still operate with antiquated factory-model, warehouse structures, where 3,000 or more students cycle through six overcrowded classes a day, taught by teachers who see far too many students a day to provide them personalized attention. (In Los Angeles today, where class sizes are hitting 50, teachers see more than 200 students daily in a reversion to the early 20th century assembly line.) Teachers also often lack the training, ongoing professional development, and support necessary to succeed.  High-quality materials, texts, computers, and libraries are scarce and often missing entirely. 

Studies in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, California, and elsewhere have shown that schools that graduate urban students at much higher rates create smaller, more personalized instructional arrangements, where teams of teachers work with groups of students over a period of time. All students have advisors and counselors who are responsible for their academic success and who work with them and their families on charting school and life pathways and addressing personal and academic needs as they arise. Schools and parents partner together to raise young people and to deal with the challenges that life in the city poses for families. 

These schools offer a rich and meaningful curriculum that is connected to important social concerns and big ideas in the disciplines. Educators demand high levels of authentic performance reflected in graduation standards that require students to undertake scientific investigations, historical research papers, literary analyses, mathematical modeling and problem solving, artistic exhibitions, and community service and internships that connect students to the world beyond the school allow them to develop personal and social responsibility. Strong, capable educators work together in teams to enable more than 90 percent of students to graduate and go on to postsecondary education and successful careers. Students complete high school because they are well-known and supported, and because of the pride and satisfaction that comes from earning a diploma that means they are competent, contributing human beings.

We will not boost graduation rates by creating new punishments or even new reformulations in the graduation rate formula. We will graduate students by redesigning schools so that they support and nurture young people, help them deal with the complexities of their lives, and help them learn material that is worth learning. Long-term improvements to the high school graduation rate require systemic investments and real changes in educational practices at the district, school, and classroom levels.    

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When you think of the high school dropout problem, one automatically thinks of high school as the starting point of the discussion.  Did the student not pass 9th grade algebra? Did the student lack motivation? These are all good questions but it’s similar to investigating why GM went bankrupt by only looking at last year’s car models.  With both GM and high school drop outs, the answer lies many years in the past, where the problems first started to crop up, perhaps unnoticed by many but there none the less. 

One thing we know reduces the dropout rate is to make sure a child has a quality early child experience. For the most at-risk kids, that experience needs to start at birth. We have evidence showing the achievement gap starts at 18 months. So why wait until 9th grade—or even 3rd, for that matter—to start dealing with it?

The Abecedarian program shows that children enrolled in early learning programs demonstrate improved math and language scores, enhanced cognitive and social skills, and decreased grade retention by age 15 (31.2% of treatment students held-back compared to 54.5% of control group students).

Early childhood education participants also are significantly more likely to complete high school and enroll in higher education programs (35% enrollment) than their control group peers (14% enrollment).

The costs associated with dropouts are enormous. The California Dropout Research Project says high-school dropouts ">http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dropouts24-2009sep24,0,1426878.story">cost the state about $1 billion a year; cutting the dropout number in half would save $550 million and prevent roughly 30,000 juvenile crimes.

September 17 the House voted to fund the Early Learning Challenge Fund to improve early learning opportunities for at-risk children.  This is a way to get students on the right track with a return on investment starting very early and ultimately resulting in more high school graduates.

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Civic Enterprises’ fascinating 2006 report about the dropout crisis, The Silent Epidemic, allows us to hear directly from high school dropouts about why they dropped out. Through focus groups, these dropouts tell a compelling story that we could immediately learn from if we chose to pay attention. First, the majority of dropouts are NOT leaving school because of significant academic challenges. Though many feel that they were not adequately prepared for high school by their earlier schooling, the major factor leading to their decision to drop out was that classes were not interesting. Two-thirds of the former students say they would have worked harder if expectations were higher. Almost 70% of respondents said they did not feel motivated or inspired to work hard, though many indicated that they would have liked to have been so inspired. 81% recognized that graduating from high school was vital to their success. 

High school dropouts were bored in school. They didn’t see linkages between what they were learning and future job opportunities. They were not motivated or inspired to work hard and so they left. And while many dropouts certainly face difficult situations at home, such as family members to care for or the need to earn a living, they know that completing high school is vital to their long-term success. 

The good news is that many of these problems can be fixed; they are not intractable social issues which take generations to change. Rather, by reorienting our approach to high schools, we can address many of the key factors leading students to drop out. But we must summon the will to make the necessary changes. The Commission on No Child Left Behind plans to do a hearing in the coming months to consider ways to reform high schools. We plan to look closely at successful high schools and learn from them. For there are excellent high schools in this country – schools that prove everyday that all high school students can be fully prepared for college and the workplace (see the US News And World Report America’s Best High Schools list which includes many open enrollment schools with high percentages of disadvantaged and minority youth).   Their success is not an accident and we believe it can be replicated.

These successful schools share some key characteristics:

1.     They set high expectations for all high school students – and support their success. 

2.     They have high standards that put all students on course to graduate prepared for college and a career, regardless of where they live.

3.     They have strong leaders and excellent teachers who know their subject matter and can share their enthusiasm with the students.

4.     They fully engage parents in the education of their student.

5.     They provide a safe learning environment.

In addition to replicating successful high schools, state and federal policies can further support these efforts by:

1. Closing the dropout factories – the 2,000 high schools that produce more than half of this country’s dropouts.

2. Encouraging and supporting the creation of high-quality charter schools and magnet schools that offer unique learning environments.

3. Ensuring that a high school diploma means students are prepared for success. This means ending the mismatch between what students are expected to know and be able to do to graduate from high school and the expectations for college and the workplace. Only by setting challenging, meaningful standards in core academic subjects can we ensure that all will be fully prepared for life after high school.

4. Improving teacher and principal effectiveness.  Teacher effectiveness is the single most important in-school factor in student success. Research also shows that effective teachers are unevenly distributed in schools, the students with the greatest needs tend to have far less access to them, and that strong leadership is critical to schools’ success.

5. Engaging parents by giving them accurate, timely information to help them become informed advocates for their child’s high school experience.

The reauthorization of No Child Left Behind provides an excellent opportunity for federal policy to support these proven strategies. As the world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, the American high school remains frozen in time – a quaint relic from our past. We must change this. Our students—America’s future leaders—deserve the best, most academically challenging and intellectually exciting high school environment we can develop. 

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The dropout rate in Rhode Island cities is nearly 30%, and our statewide dropout rate is 15%. In today’s high-tech, global economy, where it is essential that young adults attain not only a high-school degree but at least some postsecondary education or workforce training in order to succeed, a 30% urban dropout rate is a crisis, even a tragedy.

As others who have responded to this question have noted, there is no single solution to the dropout crisis. I think most would generally agree that we must make our schools more relevant and welcoming to students. In Rhode Island, under our new Secondary Schools Regulations, we have committed to personalization in all high schools, through establishing advisory programs and mentorships and by transforming larger schools into small learning communities. We are working to engage students as well as to raise rigor through our proficiency-based graduation requirements, under which all students must complete a standards-based senior project or an electronic portfolio of their work. While visiting schools during my first months as Education Commissioner, I have seen lots of evidence that students feel challenged and excited by these programs, and I am confident that these initiatives will help us keep our students on track toward graduation – a meaningful graduation.

But what about the students who struggle? What about the pregnant teenager, the student who has to work 8 hours a day to help a struggling family, the student who leaves school out of boredom or alienation? For those students, all of us must offer much more and do much better.

First of all, it’s important, as others have put it, to “get it right the first time.” We need to carefully track student performance from the beginning and deal with our concerns about performance immediately. We need an early-warning system with better monitoring and interventions in the early grades to help struggling or troubled students when they are most vulnerable. In addition, many students can certainly benefit from good mentoring programs, transition programs after middle school, and high-quality 9th-grade academies.

Second, we have to make good on our promises to offer students multiple courses of study and a variety of ways to attain course credits. We should be able to say to all high-school students: You can create, with assistance, your own pathway to meet the graduation requirements. These opportunities could include more hands-on opportunities for students to apply their learning. We should certainly create more options for credit-bearing courses by forming partnerships with adult-education centers, community colleges, workforce-development agencies, and workplace settings. The State of Vermont has been a leader in the area.

Third, we must respond to the needs of students where they are in their lives rather than where they are in their schoolwork. That is, for students who want to stay in school but cannot manage a traditional schedule, we should reconfigure the school day. We must rethink the current views of time and space for school. The day can start earlier or run later, through a twilight program. We can offer additional instruction time during the school day and after school. We can offer dual-enrollment opportunities, e-learning courses, and even an entire virtual high school.

Fourth, we should build stronger partnerships with community groups and with business leaders. We can work with social-service agencies and libraries to ensure that students have a safe and quiet place to study and to complete their homework. We can partner with childcare facilities and with social-service agencies to provide wraparound services for students in need. We must ensure that family responsibilities do not become a barrier to high-school completion.

As to business partners, we need to work with them to develop lots of ways in which students can participate in mentorships, internships, career exploration, and career training – all linked to a rigorous and relevant course of study.

Finally, I’d like to note that a lot of good thinking is underway in Rhode Island on this issue. The Governor’s Urban Education Task Force, chaired by Warren Simmons, of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, at Brown University, has looked closely at the issue of pathways for at-risk youth, and the group will release a set of recommendations to the governor next month. Our partners at Rhode Island Kids Count will join us to lead an all-day dropout-prevention summit on October 8th. Last year, Rhode Island Kids Count issued an excellent issue brief that included a set of recommendations on improving the graduation rate in Rhode Island:

http://rikidscount.org/matriarch/documents/HSGradRate%20Supplement.pdf

With world-class educators, strong partnerships, hard work, creative thinking, and unwavering commitment, I am confident that we can solve the dropout crisis in Rhode Island and across the nation.

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Dear Fellow NJ Ed Bloggers,

In addition to the great honor that it is to be able to write alongside some of the best minds in education today, I also enjoy something that goes beyond the Monday morning post. At the end of each week, I read everything you’ve all written in order to get a better sense of the topic and to learn more about it from all of you. This week I noticed something: an unusually wide variety of solutions to the problem solving the high school dropout crisis. Here’s a partial list that I culled by pulling at least one thing from each of your posts:

--Better student engagement
--More parental support
--Replace the worst schools through EMOs
--Social factors outside the family
--Success early in school
--IES study and model
--Culture shift in kids and in education
--Better and more technology
--Career exploration
--Change teaching methods and curriculum
--Encourage kids to come back and graduate later
--Targeted intervention at critical times
--Changing child labor laws
--Raising compulsory minimum age for leaving school
--Examine the broader structure of kids’ lives
--Improve the quality of education overall

This is one of the most diverse lists of opinions we’ve ever had.

As so many of you mentioned, many kids who fail to complete high school have a longer history of academic struggle that stretches back into middle, elementary, and perhaps even the pre-school years when many kids who need extra help outside the home don’t seem to get it. So I would submit that we have not been talking about the high school dropout problem at all; rather, I think we have been talking about our entire system of education.

For me, ed reform begins in 1983 with “A Nation at Risk”. That means we’re 26 years into working on the problem. That’s two K-12 generations of kids. We now have more children in school than ever, over 50 million. We also have more teachers than ever. Perhaps as many as 4.5 million. We have over 15,000 school districts and approximately 100,000 schools. Incredible amounts of research have been conducted. And an inspiring amount of philanthropy has energized innovation and made money much less of an issue in education than it used to be.

So why aren’t we getting better results?

I think there’s a large disconnect between education reform and education. Working, as I do, in both areas, I see this all the time. Recently, for example, I was doing some training at a school that serves at-risk children. As you might expect, the kids were way behind. But there was no urgency on the part of teachers to address their students’ issues. And the problem wasn’t that they were bad people with low morale, low expectations, a low level of experience, or low intelligence. The problem was simply that they all lacked what I call “teaching repertoire” – a set of reliable strategies and activities that would accelerate kids’ learning. With little in their teaching vocabularies by way of instructional techniques, they really just went along doing the same things they’d always done, used ad hoc ideas they’d pick up here and there, or randomly selected different programs which they followed with slavish devotion.

During the workshop, I gave them about ten to twelve simple things they could do that would dramatically improve their students’ learning – and in some cases even simplify their teaching. In essence, I put together a cross-grade, cross-subject “teaching oolkit” that everyone could use and be successful with regardless of where their kids were or what grade they were in.

It occurs to me that those of us who work in education reform may not be doing enough to help those who work in education increase their repertoire of simple, sensible, universally useful teaching tools. Instead, I’m afraid that our emphasis on standards are testing has had the unintended consequence of increasing the use of publisher-supplied programs and grade-specific scripted instruction – both of which can hinder teachers’ abilities to think for themselves and to increase their teaching repertoire.

One of the things I’ve thought about for a long time is something I like to call “Universal Curriculum.” The idea is simple: if we can create a small set of highly effective teaching tools that can be used in different ways in all subjects and grade levels, we would be able to accomplish three important things:

1. Train teachers quickly in reliable methods of instruction.

2. Give kids many chances, subject by subject, year after year, to master important skills.

3. Create a powerful mechanism for change that scales easily across the entire educational system.

I believe strongly, and have for many years, that “Universal Curriculum” is an important piece in the ed reform puzzle. The biggest problem that I see in the schools where I work originates with teachers who simply don’t have good ideas for teaching. Nor do they have the time or inclination to spend hundreds of hours studying research and professional literature in order to make new stuff up.

In one way or another, almost all of us suggested that in order to solve the high school dropout problem, better teaching would be required. But the likelihood of retraining such a large number of teachers is small. So is the likelihood of being able to replace much of today’s teaching workforce with significantly better teachers in the near future.

Elements of a “Universal Curriculum”, perhaps managed by the Department of Education through one or more of their Regional Educational Laboratories – and vetted thoroughly in a few hundred schools at all grade levels across the curriculum – is a workable project. It wouldn’t cost much. It wouldn’t take much time. And the expertise to pull it off already exists in the best classrooms in America.

If we can have a “common core” of content, why can’t we have a common core of tools to help teachers teach it and to help students learn it? The amount of material I’m talking about here is very small – perhaps less than 100 pages to start. And new universal tools could be brought out each year, just a few pages at a time. Through electronic delivery, the tools could be disseminated at no cost. And by combining great teaching with basic technology, we might be able to make real progress in what we all know to be the central issue of reform: teaching quality.

 

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 Increasing high school graduation rates will be a direct consequence of increasing the quality of all schools. As has been noted, students don't leave schools when they are deeply engaged and see a connection to their futures.

There are a myriad of ways to excel in high school instruction, including through the use of new technologies with which our children are already fluent.

The critical issue for us is to focus on improving what we offer students. They aren't leaving because they can't focus; and making school "compulsory" to a higher age is a sorry substitute for making it matter.

We have too many examples of success with students who were previously failing to say this crisis is anything but a crisis of low expectation and political will on the part of adults. Parents have to be relentless in their school choices; and school leaders must be relentless about their work, and honest about its effect.

Trying to reduce the rate of high school dropouts without directly and actively engaging parents is like trying to fix a leaky roof without plugging up the holes. You can put out lots of buckets, nail up some plastic, but every time it rains the water is going to gush right through. No matter how much we reform curriculum or improve teacher training, if parents aren’t voraciously leading the charge against dropping out, kids are going to continue to view leaving high school as a rational and easy option.

I say kids because we are talking about kids — the path to dropping out of high school starts in early elementary school. And as Pedro Noguera noted so well, much of the problems and the solutions lie beyond school walls. Parents are at the heart of students’ formation of goals, expectations, motivation and sense of accountability.

A recent study, led by Civic Enterprises and funded by the Gates Foundation, conducted focus groups and surveyed hundreds of dropouts across the country. What did they have to say? For almost half of respondents, parents or guardians had not been involved in their schooling; most of those that were involved only became so toward the end of their child’s high school career for disciplinary reasons. The majority of parents were not aware of their child’s chronic truancy; less than half said that their parents were contacted by the school if they were absent. One of the top five reasons dropouts gave for leaving was that they had “too much freedom and not enough rules;” another top reason was that they’d missed too many days. Over two thirds of respondents said that they didn’t “feel motivated or inspired to work hard.”

What should be done? Ask the dropouts, themselves. Seven in ten said that more parental involvement would have made a difference.

We need outreach and education such that all parents — poor parents, working parents, parents who don’t speak English — are empowered to guide their children’s education. Parents need easy access to good information, enabling them to answer basic questions: Is my child on-track with academic requirements? If not, where is he/she struggling and what resources are available to get up to grade-level? What does my child have for homework? Is my child frequently late to or missing school? Beyond this, parents need support in cultivating the high expectations, goals and college/career planning that can sustain their children through the high school years.

Many policymakers and funders shy away from the realm of parenting, perhaps because it seems too difficult to influence. But we shouldn’t give up. Even a modest increase in effective parent involvement could have as much impact as major school reforms.

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When it comes to tackling America’s dropout crisis, the first thing we need is to actually recognize that we have a crisis. Then we need to recognize that this crisis is actually one that schools themselves have the power to solve. And that’s where a lot of Americans, educators and citizens alike, simply aren’t on board. Instead, many of us, drawing on personal experiences in which extensive parental support has been an essential component in our own success, continue to believe that it is in fact an essential condition for all children’s success. 

This persistent belief flies in the face of all the mounting evidence we have for the transformative power of “school effects” on student achievement, regardless of family circumstances. Caroline Hoxby’s just-released study of student achievement New York City’s charter schools, is, among other things, a significant statement on the power of “school effects” to close the achievement gap: http://bit.ly/IgccV Likewise, the Education Trust has done considerable ongoing work to document the tremendous boost in academic outcomes for disadvantaged students achieved by “high impact” high schools   http://bit.ly/2Vg340.

The implications of this reality for addressing the country’s drop-out crisis are two-fold. First, we have an urgent need to realize the full power of “school effects” precisely in those communities where students are the most “school dependent.” This is why Secretary Duncan’s recent emphasis on shutting down the nation’s 5,000 worst-performing public schools and replacing them with new high-performing schools is vital. New schools are an especially important part of the strategy when it comes to re-engaging “over-age and under-credit” youth—High School for the Recording Arts in St. Paul Minnesota is one example of a charter school that has done so by building a high school curriculum around a working sound studio and record label. Likewise the Hartford, CT school district’s turnaround strategy rests in no small measure on breaking up its large comprehensive high schools into smaller theme-based academies with higher graduation standards and a special focus on culinary arts, nursing, public safety etc.

Second, while there is of course much work to be done in the nation’s schools and districts themselves, we also need to make a strong parallel effort to shift public opinion—and that of policymakers—towards a fuller appreciation of just how much difference a great school can make for its students. There are no magic fixes, but here in Connecticut we’re getting a start on this by documenting and publicizing the work of the state’s “Success Story” schools through video documentaries and in-person public tours: http://bit.ly/pnhPb. Once people see for themselves a great school that is literally transforming its’ students lives “against the odds,” it’s hard to settle for anything less.

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I am often shocked by how people outside of the education arena are so susprised by the staggering dropout rate that continues to plague our country.  Sharing the facts about this pervasive issue is critical to finding and implementing programs to address it – because this is a very real problem for our economic future.  While the potential reasons for students dropping out are many, in many cases kids typically did not see their education as relevant or did not see options to help them complete school, especially once they failed a course required for graduation. The good news is that some schools, districts, and states are truly keeping kids in school and helping them to be prepared for college and the workforce. 

Floydada Independent School District in Texas utilizes technology throughout teaching and learning and provides students with a 24/7 laptop. In this low income community, only 57% of adults have a high school degree, but close to 50% of the senior class are taking reduced rate college courses offered through the high school.  This not only saves families an estimated $60,976, but represents a three-fold increase in college courses taken by students in this school reflecting interest and enthusiasm about college by students who never thought they would go on to higher education. On the state standardized tests, 6th grade math scores increased by 29 points, and 10th grade standardized math scores increased by 36 points.  The students are also accessing opportunities like NASA Engineering programs and are creating their own products and knowledge. 

Greene County, North Carolina with high rates of poverty and low educational attainment recently increased their tests scores and college going rate.  In 2003, Greene County, NC provided all students in grades 6 through 12 with laptop computers and access to an affordable wireless internet system.  Since that time, college application rates have nearly tripled to over 90 percent, SAT composite scores increased by 41 points and high school proficiency scores increased from 53 percent to 78 percent. 

Alabama ACCESS Distance Learning is a statewide, school-based program that is free to Alabama students in Grades 9-12. The initiative focuses on bringing true equity in instructional opportunities to all Alabama high school students by providing access to Advanced Placement, dual credit, and core courses, as well as electives, remedial and enrichment materials, and other courses necessary to meet advanced diploma requirements.  In addition to courses, ACCESS provides three regional support centers across the state, a 21st Century Classroom for each Alabama high school, and a statewide technical infrastructure. ACCESS also provides courses to homebound students, delivers online professional development for teachers, and provides access to multimedia resources to be used in instruction.  Since its implementation in the spring of 2006, the program has contributed to significant increases in the graduation rate at some schools in the state.  In Tarrant City, a small urban inner city district adjacent to Birmingham where 85% of the population is in poverty and 75% of the population is minority, after participating in the ACCESS program, reported that 78% of students graduated from high school, a significant increase of almost 14% over prior years. 

In Louisiana, Algebra I on-line projects, part of the Louisiana Virtual School, provides Louisiana students with certified, qualified Algebra I instructors through a year-long on-line course targeting rural and urban districts.  With 8th grade students, 98 percent of students scored basic or above on state tests, and 43% scored mastery. These students outperformed similar students in the face-to-face version of the course. The Virtual School was also critical to high school students in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In all of these examples, technology was an essential component for success.  We know that engaging students and ensuring that their education meets their individual needs is essential.  When a student who may otherwise dropout suddenly sees his education as relevant, he is much more likely to want to continue and to succeed.  We also know that students use technology outside of school, and maximizing technology for their education also helps to meet kids where they are.  While technology is not, in and of itself, the answer, we see again and again how maximizing the potential of technology can engage students, provide options for students, allow for individualized learning, and empower teachers in meeting various learning styles and needs.

Technology can be used for practical and contextual solutions:

1. providing access to engaging and rigorous digital content,
2. improving teacher effectiveness and equitable distribution of teachers,
3. using real-time, on-going data to individualize instruction,
4. improving data systems to measure student and system performance, and
5. developing supportive communities that foster the home, school and community connection. 

As we consider these key areas which closely align with the priorities set out in the ARRA Assurances, it is hard to imagine tackling these important issues without the use of technology.  With business and other industries as models, it really does not make sense to miss the opportunity.  Technology is not the silver bullet or a quick fix, but the thoughtful integration of technology can play a significant role in helping to engage students and provide them with an individualized education.  Approaches like these are already demonstrating the potential of reducing the dropout rate, and we can all work to bring these models and programs to scale to affect more kids. 

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About 30 percent of high school students drop out before graduation, meaning about 1 million students fail to graduate from high school every year. Only five in 10 Black and Hispanic students graduate on time with a standard diploma.

Make no mistake, this has developed into a national crisis that has far-reaching implications, not just for the individual students and their futures, but for the economy and the entire country. Addressing this crisis will require multiple approaches at the state and national level. The National Education Association has developed a 12-point action plan for reducing the school dropout rate.

Foremost, just as we established compulsory attendance to the age of 16 or 17 in the beginning of the 20th century, it is appropriate and critical to eradicate the idea of "dropping out" before achieving a diploma. To compete in the 21st century, all of our citizens, at minimum, need a high school education. We should mandate high school graduation or equivalency as compulsory for everyone below the age of 21.

Reducing the dropout rate will require collaboration between state, local and national leaders, along with parents and the entire community, at every step in a student’s education. We must act early with high-quality, universal preschool and full-day kindergarten; strong elementary programs that ensure students are doing grade-level work when they enter middle school; and middle school programs that address causes of dropping out that appear in these grades.

It is more tempting for students to drop out of schools that are not safe and classrooms that are poorly maintained and outdated. We all have a responsibility in making sure every student has access to a quality public school.

We also must increase career education and workforce readiness programs in schools so that students see the connection between school and careers after graduation. Students should have access to expanded graduation options through creative partnerships with community colleges in career and technical fields, so that students have another way to earn a high school diploma.

These are just some of the approaches necessary to combating this crisis. For more information on NEA’s 12-point dropout prevention plan, please visit www.nea.org/home/18106.htm.

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It’s a curious question that keeps getting curioser.   If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will get you there—as we were reminded in Alice in Wonderland.   The more important question is why kids have dropped out, and what they might be dropping into—if we offered it. We avoid the question of “why schooling” by pointing to the monetary value that different certificates bring us. It used to be 4th grade, the 8th, then 12th, than an AA and finally a BA. Finally? Of course, not, then come MAs and Phds.  

But the correlation between ach certificate and paycheck may have very little to do with what you got out of each level, but that it’s a fast screening device. In which case if everyone could and did get an MA—no dumbing down-- a master’s degree wouldn’t signify on the job market.   We’d have to find something else.

There are at present, lots of engineers out of work. Experienced ones who have been laid off. That’s a jobs issue, not a school issue. There will hopefully always be a need for bus drivers, sanitation men, gardeners, and window washer. Since they vote and serve pn juries I take for granted they should be well-educated too.

If a student finishes ¾ of the courses toward a diploma—is he worth ¾ of what a graduate should—or do we assume that nothing was learned in the first ¾, but all depends on the last semester?

Can we argue for and defend on paper what it actually is that makes a high school drop-out less “whatever” than a graduate, and ditto for AA’s and BA’s? Or are these stand-ins for something we do not teach and cannot measure--a shortcut screening device for employers. (Maybe just sticking it out? Or having the resources to do so?)

What young people need is to be engaged with the world they live in, engaged in ways that make learning the right stuff inevitable, under the tutelage of adults who are in the midst of such work. That might be “academic” or it might not. But if the academy is worth its salt, surely there are ways they can contribute to young people’s fascination with life and desire to master what they find interesting and worth knowing.

There are few schools that start there, and then figure out what to do to make it so.   When we do we’ll have fewer drop-outs from productive, satisfying and socially useful life.

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Secretary  Duncan is right, we should improve/replace the worst schools in the country.  This would quickly improve the drop out problem.  The improvement in holding power of Locke High School after Green Dot took over is an impressive example.  There are four dozen charter management organizations like Green Dot that run very good schools and they're ready to take on 'restart' opportunities nationally.  They all run small supportive college prep schools with proven results.  

Without concerted advocacy we'll see few restarts and more tepid district-led improvement efforts.  A strong push by local and national advocacy groups could result in more than 200 restarts per year.  In 4-5 years we could replace most of the dropout factories and make a substantial contribution to improving the national graduation rate. 

We must keep in mind that the drop out problem is only a symptom of a much larger problem.  If we only respond to the symptom we will never address the root causes.  Academic failure is only one part of the problem.  As several commentators have suggested this can best be addressed through early intervention practices that identify struggling students and provide support while they are still in elementary school.

Not all students who dropout are behind academically.  Many are simply bored because they don't see the relevance of what they are learning in school to what is happening in their lives.  This suggest that we need to create stronger ties between the curriculum and he lives of our children so that they can see how what they learn in school can be used to solve real problems that they and their families face.  Strong vocational programs with links to real jobs are one way to do this.  Problem posing education that encourages children to thiink critically about what they learn and apply to real problems is yet another.

Additionally, we lose many students because they are alienated from the adults that serve them.  We have too few counselors in our high schools and many of our schools are highly impersonal.  We can build stronger relationships by encouraging participation in extra curricular activities that respond to student interests and by re-designing the structure of schools so that relationships be tween adults and students can be fostered naturally. 

Finally, there are many students who leave school for social and economic reasons that are beyond their control.  A large number of immigrant students leave school to work to support their families.  Some miss school because the schools they attend are unsafe and the neighborhoods they must pass through each day are controlled by gangs.  Others fall behind because they have responsibilities at home (sick parents, small children that must be watched and cared for) that result in them missing many days of school.  There is a reason why poor students have higher drop out rates; they face greater obstacles.  Students whose basic needs are not met will often find it necessary to find ways to meet those needs and unless they see school as a source of solutions to the problems they face they may turn elsewhere.  In many communities we are losing kids to the streets because schools lack the capacity to respond to the challenges children face. 

Schools must work more closely with non-profits, churches and CBOs to respond more creatively to student needs.  City government must work with the schools to address safety and build strong ties between local industry and the academic preparation students receive.  We have models in place that are successful and there are innercity high schools like Fredrick Douglass in Harlem that graduate most of the students they serve.  Let's do more of what works and stip blaming kids and their families. 

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Marguerite Kondracke has it about right but I'd say it more bluntly and simply: young people who are succeeding in school rarely drop out. Kindergarten is not too early to address the dropout problem--by ensuring that those who make their way to first grade are prepared to succeed there. Now repeat that a dozen times. This means all the obvious: great teachers; lively and well crafted curricula; interesting and content-filled classes; the right blend of standards, assessments, interventions, help and results-based accountability; counseling; parent engagement; other good school choices. And, of course , the prospect of suitable reward (e.g. graduation, college) at the end if one sticks it out and succeeds. I won't call that simple--but none of it is unfamiliar.

I think Mr. Peha must be unfamiliar with the standards of scientific research at IES.

To get a medium level of evidence or even a low level of evidence against IES standards, a practice would be very much worth considering as a response to a problem. Sadly, we have very few high level, "gold" strategies or interventions. Until we do, the "silver" or "bronze" are the best we have and are quite helpful.

While the document speaks in terms of "what" to do, many experienced practitioners have been turning those "whats" into "hows." For example, many recipients of Aspire grants from the AT&T Foundation have used this research at least in part for their initiatives.

Something tells me Mr. Peha could do (and probably does do) the same.

In Washington, we tend to look for specific, quantifiable answers to problems such as the dropout crisis. We think we can solve these challenges if only we unlock the magic equation – whether it’s the number of hours in the school day or years of experience on a teacher’s resume, federal policymakers seem to gravitate toward measurable, even tangible solutions. Perhaps this is because if the solution lies in the numbers, it would be easy for Washington to control. 

Unfortunately, there is no magic equation. There’s no doubt high-quality teachers are essential – but the number of years in the classroom does not always indicate the quality of the teacher. There’s no doubt extra time spent studying, whether at home, with a tutor, or in the classroom, will help students do better in school – but creating a federal mandate for a longer school day or school year would not guarantee specific improvements. 

When it comes to solving the dropout crisis, one likely ingredient to success would be a culture shift. It’s not something Washington can prescribe or control, but a change in attitude would go a long way toward keeping vulnerable students in school. We need at-risk students to see and understand the value of their education – and truly grasp the consequences of failing to complete high school. However, the question of how to change the educational culture is a more difficult one. 

More appealing school environments? Linkages with successful professionals who can inspire? A clear path to higher education or training and a well-paying job? Each of these could help, but as with the rest of the educational challenges discussed on these pages, there is no simple answer that will be equally effective for all at-risk students. This is why we must not try to dictate education solutions from D.C., but instead look to local leaders such as businesses and other partners to engage our youth in understanding the positive impact a complete education will have on their lives.

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I took Mr. Kress’s advice this morning and looked over the IES study he recommended. But I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with him on the study’s value.

The study sets up its own model for assessing the validity of its findings. This model is based on “levels of evidence”: A finding can have either a “high”, “medium”, or “low” level of evidence presumably based on available research.

Here’s the kicker: of the study’s six recommendations, none has a “high” level of evidence that it works. Four have “medium” levels. Two have “low” levels.

I find it hard to see how this study could be a successful blueprint for positively affecting the dropout rate. Upon closer reading, the study is filled with vast amounts of “what” information, as in “Here’s WHAT you can do.” But there is scarcely any “HOW” – and little analysis of which WHAT is likely to work better than any other. In my experience working in high schools across the country, I doubt that many would be able to implement the recommendations in this study. And even if they did, the study itself points out that some of it’s own recommendations probably won’t work.

I’d like to suggest that we may be asking the wrong question here. If all we wanted to do was lower the dropout rate, Diane Ravitch has the answer: lower the requirements to the point where everyone can graduate. Now, I think Ms. Ravitch finds this idea as detestable as anyone else would but let’s all take note of the fact that virtually every state has worked diligently over the years to lower the requirements of its tests. If this continues, Ms. Ravitch’s tongue-in-cheek recommendation could become a reality.

Here’s the deal: We don’t really want to lower the dropout rate, we want to make sure every high schooler develops the knowledge and skills they need to go to college, to find meaningful work, and to be a good citizen. So the real question is, “How do we make sure every kid gets a good high school education?”

Let’s start at the beginning shall we? We can reliably identify kids who struggle with literacy late in their kindergarten year or early in 1st grade. These kids do not need to be held back but they do need strong intervention in reading and writing. Reading Recovery is probably the strongest program in the world. And if elementary teachers are using the Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop method of instruction, all kids will get tons of literacy in regular classes, too. High quality literacy instruction (through the workshop method and Reading Recovery) must be the focus of elementary school; we must offer a no-nonsense guarantee that every kid will read and write by the end of 3rd grade. And we must use methods which give kids the best possible chance to meet that goal.

Third grade is the next critical spot. Kids who are not literate by 3rd grade have little hope of making it all the way through school. This would be the first potential retention year. But I wouldn’t just retain kids back to their original classrooms. Several schools where I have worked have developed what they call “Literacy School”. It’s an all-day focus on literacy that is used either to get kids back in with their current grade level or to help kids who have been held back a year. Again, use of the workshop model of teaching is critical here for differentiation.

Next up: 5th grade or 6th (or whatever the exit year is to middle school or junior high). This is another logical place to retain students. Again, problems with literacy are the most likely problems for kids to have. But some kids have problems with behavior, too. They’ll need special attention during their retention year to be ready for middle school. And let’s not forget the math either. Kids who don’t understand basic math get killed when they hit algebra, geometry, and trig (all three of which we will require in high school, of course!)

Last, but not least, what’s wrong with doing 8th grade over again if you’re not ready to move on to high school? A second 8th grade year, might look like this: two hours of reading, two hours or writing, two hours of math – and a whole lotta homework.

Now, this plan has the potential to retain kids in several places, so let’s get rid of one by making middle school go away and creating K-8 elementary schools. The middle school model has never been shown to work very well. And much of the curriculum is just a rehash of the upper elementary grades anyway. Kids act much better and, I would assume, learn much more, in a K-8 environment. And for kids lucky enough to live in the same place, they get to go nine years without a transition.

The best way to make sure kids get a good high school education is to prepare them for it. For all the sound and fury self-righteousness over the tragedy of social promotion, we still use it all over the United States in almost every school and every grade. Kids are kicked up through elementary into middle school and then onto high school without the slightest regard for their readiness for these experiences. In fact, I have sat with high school principals, looked at the test data for incoming freshman, and been able to predict the dropout rate right there. Knowingly consigning a child to years of academic failure is wrong and possibly even abusive.

So there’s a basic district structure that would help dramatically. Kids would enter high school when they were ready and everyone below that level would work hard to make sure they got ready as quickly as possible. But what would kids find when they got there?

As reform has progressed, in-service teachers have received significant amounts of training over the last 15 years. But only elementary teachers have consistently applied this training (and really, it has only been the primary grade teachers who have revamped their teaching in any meaningful way as a result). This probably explains why the only place we see consistent and significant test score gains is at the elementary level.

But high school culture is very, very different. For one thing, teachers are driven much more by their subjects than they are by their students. The teaching is highly traditional and, for the most part, still unaffected by contemporary methodologies. In short, for many kids, high school is boring, irrelevant, and impersonal. Most American high schools are designed for only one outcome: to send kids to college. Yet even before the first day of school, we know many kids will not go to college. And even if every kid was capable of going to college, we don’t have enough colleges to educate them.

So high school itself has to change. Top priority: change teachers. Several of the best high school principals I work with say they make an effort to hire elementary and middle school teachers to work in their buildings because these teachers are more oriented to the craft of teaching and to the needs of the kids they teach. High school teachers can’t sit out reform anymore. They have to begin using the training everyone else is receiving. And they have to change their priorities from subject to students.

Next, we have to provide legitimate, non-stigmatized course offerings and programs for kids who don’t want to go to college. We have to give these kids a promising path if for no other reason than there are so many of them and we will never EVER have enough colleges to send them off to. Nationally, I believe that only about 60% of high school students go on to some from of higher education. That means 40% don’t. A good chunk of that 40% are where our dropouts come from. College can’t be the only reason to go to high school. And we can’t tell kids that every one of them can go to college when we know that isn’t true.

After we’ve changed high schools, let’s make two structural changes to the laws that govern high schooling. Make kids stay in school until they’re 18 rather than the current age of 16. And put some effort into eradicating the inevitable truancy that will result in the first few years this law is implemented.

Next, make another change in the opposite direction: allow people of any age to come back to high school in order to finish. My friends in Canada tell me this works quite well. Maybe we can’t have 22-year old high school athletes, but we sure could have 22-year old high school seniors. Not only do we let older people come back to high school, we encourage them to do so through two vehicles. First, we get rid of the GED. GED classes do not provide the rigor or comprehensiveness our high schoolers need. Second, we make graduating from high school a civic value and a personal responsibility.

I’ve spent a lot of time teaching high school kids. And even the really, really low ones –the “at risk” kids, we like to call them – are fully capable in my opinion of doing decent high school work. The reason they don’t is that no one ever really helps them very much without making them feel like idiots. And when they do get the help they need, there are rarely any structures in our schools to keep them working as consistently as they need to in order to be successful.

Let me show you what I’m talking about: I worked for three years in a district with twelve very large high schools. After three years, one school emerged with the highest test scores. What was the secret?

1. Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop teaching with an emphasis on literacy at the freshman and sophomore levels. Best option for increasing literacy levels and differentiating instruction to meet the needs of a wide range of learners.

2. Classroom use of the Love and Logic discipline model.

3. Procedural management in each classroom to improve classroom behavior and instructional efficiency, and to ease challenges for teachers.

4. A student self-assessment-based grading system that helped kids understand where they were every 2-4 weeks and what they needed to do to improve.

5. A system of “places” kids could go when they found themselves behind on their work. They could come in before school; they could work at lunch; they could work on a free period; they could work after school; and if none of that worked, they could come in for Saturday school. Each “place” was monitored by an adult, and kids were tracked through each “place” with a simple paper-based system so every teacher knew where his or her kids were going next if they still had more work to do.

We didn’t need a study to cook this up. We just needed to use a little common sense about the kids we were working with, the problems they were having, and the resources we had at our disposal.

I believe that if we reframe the “dropout crisis” in more positive terms related to securing a high quality education for every high school student, we will be significantly more successful. But that’s the “outside of school” or “public” message. In schools we need three rules:

1. Don’t send kids to high school until they are ready.

2. Craft a series of effective interventions at the most logical pre-high school grade levels to keep kids moving up as effectively as possible.

3. Change the culture of high school to make best practice teaching the rule rather than the exception.

I don’t see the “dropout crisis” as a crisis. I see it as the natural result of running kids through school systems that are based on principles that were formed in the 1950s when we didn’t care that a significant percentage of our country’s children did not get good educations – or even attend high school. If we want contemporary results for contemporary kids (and we’re serious about leaving no child behind) we have to apply contemporary ideas. Otherwise, we may as well go back to those nostalgic days before Brown v. Board of Education when most of us just looked the other way.

 

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The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that if twelve of the nation's largest cities reduced the number of dropouts from one high school class by half, we would see more than $1.5B per year in additional wages. Earlier this year, a McKinsey & Co. analysis of the achievement gap (http://edequality.org/content/pages/mckinseyreport/) sized its economic impact at $500B annually, likening this to a permanent recession. It goes without saying that solving the dropout crisis and closing the achievement gap have profound economic benefits.

High school dropouts are not, of course, uniformly distributed across our student body. As is too often the case in U.S. public education, dropouts are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately students of color – the racial and ethnic achievement gap. The Alliance for Excellent Education tells us that 38% of African American students and 33% of Latino students attend dropout factories. These factories, which account for 51% of the entire nation's dropouts, produce 81% of all Native American dropouts, 73% of all African American dropouts, and 66% of all Hispanic dropouts. Perhaps the only silver lining here is just how much good we could do by transforming these dropout factories.

The decision to drop out of high school is not made in an instant. Countless studies have demonstrated correlations between much earlier academic performance (e.g., 6th grade achievement and attendance) and high school graduation. Students don't simply decide one day to drop out of school; the die is cast much earlier. The root of the problem starts with inequitable access to high quality preschool, and is greatly exacerbated by the unequal distribution of quality teachers in elementary school and the summer learning loss, both of which have a disproportionate impact on low-income students.

The wheels completely come off in middle school, when low-income urban students typically attend giant schools in near-to-complete anonymity and are steered off the college prep. track. These students arrive in high schools two to four years (or more) behind, lacking critical basic knowledge and skills, quickly fall further behind, and watch their chance of graduation rapidly diminish. In most cases, there is no adult who takes direct responsibility for individual student success. For too many kids, school is boring and pointless, and they feel little reason to attend, so they drop out.

We know how to fix this problem. Everywhere across the country we have the proof we need – exceptional public schools where these same students, predominantly low-income students of color, are excelling academically, graduating from high school, and heading off to college well prepared. These beat-the-odds schools serve three key purposes: 1) they change the lives of the students they serve, 2) they silence the insidious voices who argue “these kids” cannot learn, and 3) they serve as models for the rest of the country, real examples of how to get it done. The great majority of these successful schools – public and charter alike – share a simple powerful formula that propels low-income and minority student to college: small supportive schools with talented, dedicated teachers and leadership; college prep. curriculum; and universally high expectations and a willingness to work with each student up to and through high school graduation.

The only thing standing between us and another million graduates—and a $500B economic boost—is the courage to do what works. The place to start is supporting Secretary Duncan's call to replace the nations 5,000 worst schools (including the 2,000 dropout factories we know account for more than half of all dropouts) with schools that point kids toward college and careers. 

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America’s Promise Alliance has spent the past year and a half traveling the country to raise awareness of the dropout crisis and bring people from all sectors together to begin to think about how we can tackle it.

While there are many theories and good programs out there, we’ve learned the only true long-term solutions are comprehensive and community-based and involve a multi-tiered approach focusing on the three essentials of: prevention, intervention and recuperation.

We must do all we can to prevent students from dropping out in the first place. This starts with ensuring all children are enrolled in pre-school and continues with a special focus on the “transition” years between 5th and 6th and 8th and 9th grades – the times we know we lose ground with students. Prevention also means paying attention to the health and wellbeing of young people, along with literacy and math skills, both of which are predictors of dropping out in the future.  This is especially important in schools and neighborhoods that are the home of our lowest-performing schools, or “dropout factories.” Students face personal hurdles in poverty and crime-ridden neighborhoods that handicap them before they even reach the school steps. For this reason alone, they need the best equipped schools and skilled teachers and the most highly structured prevention plans. Most importantly, in order to turn these high schools around, we must start with their feeder elementary and middle schools.

Another piece of the prevention puzzle is service and career exploration. Especially during those critical transition periods, we must provide students with an opportunity to serve others and their communities—be it curriculum-based, peer-to-peer, or pure volunteerism. Research indicates when our young people engage in service they feel more connected to their community and as a result are more likely to view academics positively, perform better, and stay in school. Equally important is exposure to potential careers. We hear much too often from young people that they do not see the connection between their current classes and their future careers. They are bored and many are choosing not to return as a result of that. This doesn’t mean we have to help students define a career path in the 8th grade, but we do need to help them make that connection between biology class and a career as a research scientist so school will make sense to them.

The second piece of this puzzle is intervention. It goes without saying, the earlier we intervene in a struggling student’s life, the better. One of the best ways we can do this is by utilizing good data systems. Students give off smoke signals indicating they need our help long before they walk out the school door. We need to pay closer attention because these data systems are not just for test scores. They can help school districts track other important factors like absenteeism and behavior issues which are often white flags of surrender for an impending dropout. If we track these indicators, along with math and literacy scores, we can create a crystal ball to more effectively pinpoint students who need extra support early on, and align our services to suit them immediately.

The last piece is recuperation. We have to make sure that students who have already dropped out have a way back in, with no exceptions. This is often one of the hardest tasks in the dropout effort because these students are often older with competing outside responsibilities like parenting and jobs, and they are years behind their peers academically. These students sometimes have had discipline problems in the past and require special attention that traditional schools can’t provide. This is precisely why the centerpiece of this part of the solution is ensuring we have multiple, high-quality pathways for students to receive their diploma including public, charter, college-prep, technical education and alternative schools. Just as it’s imperative that we provide these multiple diploma paths to meet every student’s unique situation, we have to make sure that the word “alternative” doesn’t mean a decrease in the quality of education.

A terrific example of the success of this approach is the New York City Department of Education’s Multiple Pathways to Graduation Program. This program addresses the majority of challenges at-risk students face through their Transfer Schools, Young Adult Borough Centers, Learning to Work and Blended-GED programs. These four options provide students with the personalized learning environments and college preparatory curriculum that fits within their schedules and provides that essential career-school connection. Since its inception in 2005, the Learning to Work program alone has already served more than 10,000 students.

There is one overarching element to solving this crisis and that is the caring adult. In every case of a successful dropout turnaround, there is an adult in that young person’s life who is paying attention and supporting them.

Finally, our policymakers can play a part of this solution by reforming laws that allow students to drop out when they are only 16 years old, or focus more on seat time than real skill mastery.

The Alliance for Excellent Education’s brief shows us clearly the broader economic impact of this crisis. Add to that the social, crime and healthcare costs and there isn’t a person in this country who doesn’t feel the aftermath of losing 1.3 million students each year. Simply put, because we all are affected by it, we must all take part in solving it.

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Banning the hiring of high school dropouts is much too simplistic. Looking at our education system from bottom to top and addressing those issues which require the public will to change is what’s needed. High schools should not be blamed for the dropouts we as adults have created. High school students who drop out and end up working in low paying jobs will soon figure out the need for a decent education in order to improve their economic situation. Keeping them from this experience is asking for more trouble.

This issue is so huge; it’s hard to write a brief blog here. We need to engage students in their own learning by transforming what we do in our classrooms. We need to utilize the technology tools available to us and those to be invented to ensure that our teachers and students have the best possible access to technology for teaching and learning. We need to move away from an agrarian calendar. We need to increase the number of days of instruction. We need to increase the time students spend in our schools. We need to give our principals and teachers time in their work year and work day to collaborate and work together. We need central offices to work closely with our local schools to provide them with the assistance they need. 

We need to dispense with simplistic solutions. We need a commitment!

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Preventing students from dropping out in the first place is a common-sense priority. But we must be thoughtful about how to better meet the needs of those who have already fallen through the cracks of the public school system. A recent WestEd report illustrates that dropping out is not necessarily a permanent condition—it’s not uncommon for students to re-enroll one or more times before dropping out completely. States and districts need to re-think their dropout recovery strategies to employ a series of flexible interventions to meet the unique needs of students who have left school, including a number of potential ways for students to re-enroll in school depending on their circumstances. Students need to feel that earning sufficient credits toward graduation is a manageable task.

We should invest in research and development to identify promising school models and strategies for recovering dropouts. The Graduation Promise Act, introduced in both the Senate and the House in the 110th Congress and currently pending re-introduction, provides a little more than $2 billion for states to intervene in struggling high schools and develop research-based models to turn them around. This research could support the development of school reform models to support effective dropout recovery and broader high school improvement efforts.

We should also support states and districts in developing alternative pathways for students who have dropped out of school. One promising school reform model is the early college high school—a blended institution that combines high school and college curricula and credits, allowing students to graduate in more than four years if they need the additional time, but simultaneously allowing them to earn college credits. These schools are motivating to students, since graduation means not only a high school diploma, but some progress toward a college degree, as well. The Fast Track to College Act supports such models.  

We believe that both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are opportunities to build on the ideas that have been outlined in the Graduation Promise Act and Fast Track To College Act, and to better arm our schools to confront the dropout crisis.

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Beware quick fixes. The notion advanced by the Texas education official that states should ban—ban!—the hiring of high school dropouts won’t keep kids in school. It would simply put more of them on the road to trouble.

There’s no dropout prevention scheme, but there are dropout reduction practices that work. For starters, we know the turning-point moments in students’ lives. Youngsters who aren’t reading at grade level by third grade will have a hard time making it to graduation. The key is to love-bomb them with lots of words, relying on everything from skill-and-drill to rich texts, as well as lots of encouragement. As shown by the successes of school districts as varied as Montgomery County, Maryland and Union City, New Jersey, where 90-plus percent of the students receive free lunches, it can be done. Nonprofits can help out—the Experience Corps, which sends volunteers to tutor students from first through third grade, has an excellent track record, as does Friends of the Children, which mentors troubled youngsters from first grade through high school graduation.

Any student who fails two eighth grade courses is also in deep trouble. As New York City and other districts have shown, they need intense academic support in the ninth grade. Separating them from older students makes sense as well.

That unnamed Texas educator needs to go back to school. As is true for most “crises,” there are successes to emulate—policymakers just need to do a little research and serious thinking.

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Since the early 1960s, Americans have used the label “dropout” to capture concerns about the students who do not graduate from high school. As I have described in my research, the solutions proposed have too often focused on the presumed psychological problems and family deficits of dropouts. Michelle Fine, Melissa Roderick, Russell Rumberger, and others have documented how such stereotypes bely a complex path students lead through and out of school. Moreover, most dropout prevention and remediation efforts have typically lived on the margins of school systems, and after temporary funding from grants or a budget line-item disappeared, so have the programs. So maybe we should look at the broader structure of teen life as well as the targeted interventions in the research summary Sandy Kress linked to. In part we should look at other factors because the review identified at best moderate evidence in favor of any individual recommendation. In addition, I am skeptical that many school systems will commit to them in the long term.

This summer, when Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott proposed that businesses stop hiring school-age dropouts, he was speaking about the reciprocal relationship for teenagers between work and school. As full-time work became less accessible for teenagers in the first half of the twentieth century, they spent their time in schools instead, and by the time “dropout” became the common label for attrition from high school, graduates had become the majority experience among teenagers. The historical reality is that the boll weevil and agricultural mechanization probably did as much to increase high school graduation in the 20th century South as the work of any single educator.

I have considerable sympathy for Scott’s position, but I suspect the culprit here is the broader culture of part-time work for teenagers and the message that one can get a job easily without a diploma. The proliferation of part-time work in the last 40 years broke the message that had been created in the first half of the twentieth century. With jobs available for high school students, there is no longer a visible choice between the world of school and the world of work. Keep in mind that such a tradeoff was a creation of the early 20th century and not true for everyone. But today, a significant number of high-school students work: 17% of 16-year-old students, 30% of 17-year-old high-school students, and 36% of 18-year-old high school students worked in the spring of 2005, according to the March 2005 Current Population Survey. Technically, that is the proportion of teens reported working the week before the survey, and the percentages would have been higher if respondents were asked what proportion worked at some point during the academic year. The message my parents told my siblings and me when growing up—your job is school—is not the modal view when a significant minority of students are working during the school year.

Maybe we do not have to bar teenage dropouts from all work. Tweaking child-labor laws might do more on a practical level to change teen culture than Commissioner Scott’s draconian proposal. Texas is one of 26 states that have no school-night restrictions on when 16-year-olds can work. (Another state, Wyoming, forbids girls from working after midnight before a school day but not boys.) Texas could create a 9 pm school-age work stoppage on school nights (or 10 pm with an hour onsite break for schoolwork). That would be less extreme than Commissioner Scott’s proposal and have immediate benefits for students.

In addition, states could start linking school records to unemployment insurance records to capture attendance, grade, and work patterns in a single place for parents and school officials. All of those complaints about high-school students who sleep through morning classes? Some of that phenomenon may be teens who party or IM through the wee hours, but a good proportion are students who are trying to work. Of all 16-year-old students reported by the March 2005 Current Population Survey, 6% had worked more than 15 hours the prior week. That proportion jumps to 13% of 17-year-old high school students and 24% of 18-year-old high school students—who are in the senior year if "on track" for graduation or who may be edging away from school if not. I suspect few teachers and not all parents are aware of the hours that teenagers work. Many states have the technical capacity to make that linkage visible, and they should.

Diane Ravitch is correct: there is no cure-all. However, that may be because the discourse of dropout prevention remains stuck after almost 50 years in the rhetoric of crisis and individual student deficits. There is a great need to examine the broader structure of teenagers’ lives and see what long-term tweaks might push more teenagers to stay in school and work to graduate with a standard diploma.

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We all have our own views and opinions on these various topics. And this forum is a wonderful place to share them. But I want to encourage us where possible to turn to the best research for the answers we seek. There is a marvelous piece of work on dropout prevention that the IES published as a practice guide. Please look at it. It is solid, practical, and easily usable by practitioners.

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practiceguides/dp_pg_090308.pdf

There is one very easy answer to solving the dropout crisis. Reduce graduation standards and make it easy for everyone to get a diploma, regardless of their preparation for college or the workplace.

Many districts are already on target to achieving this goal. For example, in New York City, 74% of our highs school graduates who enter the community colleges of the City University of New York require remediation in basic skills. This, after having passed five Regents exams administered by the State Education Department! This suggests that New York State has so dumbed down its graduation exams that even a student who lacks the skills to succeed in a two-year community college can nonetheless get a high school diploma. And it further suggests that the New York City public schools continue to engage in social promotion of poorly prepared students.

Nationally, the statistics are somewhat better, but nothing to brag about. The last federal count showed that about a third of the students who enter college need remediation in basic skills. This is a huge waste of their time, their resources, and the college's resources.

But this is the inevitable result of our generally low standards for graduation.

The answer is not to get "tougher" and punish the students who are dropping out or who persevere despite the fact that they have weak skills. The answer is to improve the quality of education across the board, starting in elementary schools. The high schools that are called "dropout factories" receive large numbers of students who start their freshman year reading three or four grade levels behind. High school reform does not cure the underlying problem, which is the abysmal skills that entering freshmen have when they start high school.

School reform must begin at the beginning. We need high-quality preschool; we need elementary schools that have a full, rich curriculum that engages students and teaches them not only reading and math, but science, history, literature, and the arts. We need middle schools with an excellent curriculum as well. We need experienced teachers and experienced principals in our schools. Our schools must have close connections with social services provided by other agencies, to assist children and families in need.

There are no quick fixes.

Diane  Ravitch

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Seriously confronting the dropout crisis means building the public will for major action. A first step is motivating the public and policy makers with information showing the direct impact. In an information-age economy, education is the essential currency for economic security. Well documented is that high school dropouts are a tremendous drag on the national economy in terms of lost wages and taxes, as well as increased spending on health care and crime. A 2007 study by Columbia University’s Hank Levin documented that cutting the dropout rate by one-half would ultimately result in a total of $45 billion in increased federal tax revenues and cost savings.

Thanks to a new economic model that that the Alliance has just developed, we can also measure the positive economic benefits that sharply reducing the number of dropouts produces in communities.For example, reducing the number of dropouts for a single high school class by just 50 percent would result in an average of nearly $500 million per year in additional wages and 14,000 new homeowners for the New York City metro area. For public officials grappling with agonizing budget cuts, demonstrating the solid return on investment in turning high school dropouts into graduates can determine critical policy decisions.

There is also the overriding moral imperative to provide every student with an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream. Many dropouts face a future of much lesser job opportunities and incomes, greater health challenges, higher incarceration rates and overall less ability to participate fully in an increasingly complex society. This plight is aggravated for many poor and minority students, who drop out at rates far higher than their peers. Meanwhile, US graduation rates have stagnated and other countries are producing more and better prepared students, presenting us with a competitiveness challenge for jobs in terms of both quality and quantity.

Second, whether you view the dropout crisis from an economic, equity, or global participation perspective, it is clear that federal policymakers have an essential role in addressing the dropout crisis. As a former Governor and member of the House of Representatives with a deeply-rooted belief that education is primarily a state and local issue, I urge federal policymakers to keep in mind the following:

Be strategic: Scarce dollars should encourage transformative actions, not continue existing practices that produce the same lackluster outcomes. I’m not interested in making a dysfunctional education system more expensive: that won’t help students, it won’t help the education system, and it certainly won’t help the national deficit. If we are truly interested in addressing the dropout crisis, federal policymakers should be strategic with taxpayer dollars. The initial step is designing policies and investments to prioritize the lowest performing secondary schools that produce a large percentage of the nation’s dropouts and address the needs of the most at-risk or struggling secondary school students. Fortunately, we have research and data that can be used to both identify and prioritize these schools and students, and help guide state and local efforts to improve schools and prevent students from dropping out. Thoughtful and strategic policy that targets the dropout crisis in this way is exactly the kind of education leadership federal policymakers should provide.

Reauthorize ESEA There’s reason to be optimistic about the transformational potential of current education efforts. Around the country, there are of pockets of excellence where teachers, principals, and district leaders have made significant improvements in graduation rates in even the most challenging schools. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has provided multiple opportunities for state, local and nonprofit leaders to take on the dropout crisis through innovative reform. And many state leaders have committed to the development of common standards designed to guide the system toward college and career readiness for all students. However, these various efforts do not represent a coordinated system of reform aligned to the goal of reducing the dropout crisis. Moreover, existing policy—in the current form of the No Child Left Behind Act—remains woefully out of sync with these efforts and is in need of improvement when it comes to high schools. Federal policymakers should seize the opportunity to reauthorize Elementary and Secondary Education Act sooner rather than later to address the flaws in the current law, scale up innovative and successful practices, and align and coordinate the many strategies underway as a result of the one-time stimulus funding.

Flip the federal role: Unfortunately, the current federal role in the K–12 education system, and particularly high schools, does not reflect the strengths and weaknesses of these different levels of government, nor the needs of students, the school system, or the nation. Federal policymakers should flip the system. In other words, federal policy should establish college and career readiness as the goal for all students and support collaborative state-led efforts to define those expectations through common standards and aligned assessments. It should also require that state and local policymakers, administrators, and educators use that and other data to inform decisionmaking around policy and practice and to ensure improvement. However, it should leave those decisions—about what to do, when, and how—to the educators who are closest to students and schools. On the ground, educators should use data and comprehensive approaches to address the problems that confront them, pulling from the best that practice and research have to offer them. In other words, federal policy should be firmer and tighter in establishing overall goals and ensuring that they are met while being more flexible and less prescriptive in determining how educators meet those goals.

It is time to move from talking about the dropout crisis to action that will move the nation toward the goal of all students graduating from high school ready for college and careers. Given the window of opportunity presenting itself to federal and national leaders, the time to act is now.

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