Fixing the Dropout Crisis, Part I
Last night I attended a Teacher Town Hall on the dropout crisis in Washington, DC. It was hosted by Howard University Television (WHUT) and WAMU, our local public radio station.
All in all, it was a little underwhelming. In addition, my quest for international superstardom was again thwarted. I had signed up to attend and indicated that I was not currently a classroom teacher when I did so. When I got there I was not admitted because I was not currently a teacher. Because they didn’t fill up all the seats some of us were told we could sit in the studio so long as we did not speak. I declined and stayed in the overflow room to watch.
Much of what the teachers shared were anecdotal stories of how they had helped some student. One teacher shared her point system, another her positive affirmations; things like that. There was little by way of systemic ideas and a lot of descriptions of extra-school issues that contribute to under-achievement.
Two of the best comments were from friends and former colleagues Cosby Hunt and Sharifa Edwards. Cosby noted the importance of retaining teachers; meaning giving them the support and respect they need to want to stay. This is clearly an afterthought for DCPS. Sharifa talked about the students she neglects because she has to spend all of her time working with those at the bottom.
I’ll have more to say about this later, after I watch the whole thing again. But one generalization I can make is that the teachers understand the power of relationships and how they treat students. Finding a teacher you like who you know cares about you could keep you in school.
These relationships are powerful and rewarding and I believe the reason most of us started teaching. But that is not a systemic solution. At any given time, you might have a handful of these relationships and your colleagues might have similar relationships with other kids. But that still doesn’t cover very many students.
The teachers explicitly did not say things like “If my objective was written more clearly then fewer students would drop out” or “If I could just enter a little more data into my spreadsheet…”.
What the teachers know works is exactly what is being crowded out of our professional lives because of the BS you are all familiar with.
So, there you go.
This event was the culmination of a nine-part series on high school dropouts put together by WAMU. The series itself is very good and you should listen to it. It was done by Kavitha Cardoza, whose voice always makes me believe everything will be OK. I think she might be an angel.
Like I said, I will say more about all this later. Meanwhile, what do you think would help in reducing dropout rates (aside from juking the stats)? Please share thoughts and ideas even if you do not have a complete solution that can be implemented immediately.
In other news:
1) I got a new bike today!
2) DC City Council Chair Kwame Brown is about to plead guilty to bank fraud and resign has just resigned. It was just a month ago that my city council member from Ward 5, Harry Thomas, was convicted of stealing more than $350,000 from youth sports programs.
It looks like Marion “bitch set me up” Barry can be proud of his town again. (Marion Barry is the international embarrassment and former long-time mayor of DC who went to jail after an FBI sting caught him buying and smoking crack. After getting out of jail, he was elected mayor again…Yeah, I know. What’s more, the geniuses in the poorest part of the city, Ward 8, continue to elect him to be their city council member. Whatever…Come to think of it, that’s where a lot of the dropouts are.)
Mr. Teachbad
What can be done about the dropout rate? Realistically? With the system in place? With the culture in place? NOTHING. For every kid you can “change” for the better, 100, if not more, will not.
Shitty parents often lead to shitty kids. Let’s be honest. The entire culture of our country has gone to hell. Babies are having babies. Teachers are blamed for everything. Feel-good programs are still rampant and are nothing more than a smoke-screen; a way to ignore the elephant in the room. I can go on and on…..and on.
Back to school and kids, the world has allowed them way too much leeway. Responsibility is a concept they know nothing about. It has been replaced with a sense of entitlement for them (and often their parents).
Bottom line: Expect nothing to change because the damage is already done and this politically-correct world will resist any opposition.
I agree! I teach elementary and I believe it starts here. Right down to giving school supplies. My student bragged to me that his family has 5 TVs. I asked him why he never has a pencil. Talk about entitlement!
So True!
To really improve the dropout rate American leaders really have to tackle the major problems endemic in the underclasses: first of all, that there IS an underclass, and such a large one; unemployment (due to the flight of well-paid manufacturing jobs to the third world where they get tax breaks for paying employees dirt); minimum wage employment that does not pay a living wage (see above reason); lack of essential social services like health care, affordable housing, pre-K programs and social worker outreach. These were all weak before and have gotten significantly weaker under the regime of austerity implemented under Republican leadership, with some help from Democrats as well.
As far as what we, in the schools, can do…that is no less complicated, because, as you well put it, other than the few relationships we can form with some students, there is little we can do as individuals, other than be advocates for fixing the rest of the problems that surround them. But in terms of what the school system can do…less emphasis on high-stakes testing that has turned elementary school–yeah, you know, the years when kids traditionally actually LIKE school–into a prison sentence. Getting vocational programs back into schools and putting new ones in place, including strong internship/apprenticeship programs, so that a child can, in addition to basic curriculum courses, take courses from elementary to advanced levels in, say, auto mechanics, and get an internship his senior year working for a local mechanic, so that coming out of school he could either be hired by his internship provider or relatively easily get a job elsewhere, without having to take out a bunch of student loans to go to a tech school…
This is done in Europe and it is highly effective. I don’t believe in automatically tracking kids–I think they should have a choice, and no one should tell a poor kid he is going to be a mechanic just because–but I think they should have the option, and I can tell you from personal experience, an awful lot of those low-performing kids who are dropping out might stay in school if, instead of having 4 periods of reading and math to prepare for a test they feel they’ll never pass and don’t care to pass, they had 1 period each of English, math, social studies and science, and then the rest in vocational classes they felt would provide them with a route to a well-paid job after high school…auto mechanics, HVAC, cosmetology, culinary arts, computer tech, plumbing, etc., etc.
It is truly a shame that this society has come to so disregard skilled manual labor as to tell kids, whether implicitly or explicitly, that they will be nothing if they don’t go to college. College is not for everyone, and it doesn’t need to be. There are already not enough jobs for current college grads, and why make kids waste time and money on something they will either not be successful at or will hate or both? Let’s bring vocational back, let’s value it and treat those careers with the respect they deserve, and quit telling kids they are failures if they don’t go to college…for starters.
Cailin For Mayor of NYC! You hit the nail on the head with each point you made.
Extremely well put. Every student should be given the opportunity to engage in a college prep curriculum if they want to, but it should not be forced upon them. Vocational training, especially in computer tech skills, should be offered and students who choose to take this path should not be made to feel dumb about it. I think the biggest problem with this is that groups like the College Board advocate heavily for pushing all kids into college prep classes, while there are few, if any, groups that similarly advocate for the vocational pathway. (I guess there’s not enough money to be made.) I’ve had friends argue that a society in which everyone was a college graduate would be an “enlightened” one, and so college readiness should be pushed hard in schools. I think that our society would be much more “enlightened” if people were educated to a competent level in most subject areas, and then allowed to choose a path that interested them to complete their education, rather than being shoved into AP courses that they are unprepared for, nor care about (and ultimately, that they will fail).
There is no perfect solution to this. There are lazy people in the world, and lazy people often fail at things. Some students, even when given a “hands-on” path to a job after high school, will still fail. But you have to start somewhere…
Well, damn, I thought you were working on the teacher dropout crisis. If you’d solve that, and we had schools where kids knew who would be teaching them next week, let alone next year… if we got to spend more than ten minutes on teaching a course, maybe we could develop some fun in the classroom… if the principals didn’t try and fire the teachers every time they saw kids having fun instead of sitting in rows silently…gosh, perhaps a field trip every year just for the sheer joy of going somewhere other than the jail-like school…
Look I went to grad school, and I’m pretty sure I would never have survived the high school in which I currently allegedly teach. Half the classes are on computers ( oh yeah, that encourages collaboration – can we say hypocrite, children?), and there is no art or music, no shop, no cooking, no creativity of any sort. If you are 18, then get the hell out and take the GED, kids. Sure you’ll go to the community college and take remedial courses, fully funded by the taxpayer, but they weren’t going to give you remedial courses at high school, they were going to berate you for failing Algebra II, and make you stay until you’re 20. Dropping out is the only sensible option for the kids – they aren’t stupid. And the teachers (sadly,we continue to hope we can slay the windmills, we’re much more stupid).
Amen brother!
We could use fewer graphic organizers and more fun in all aspects of education.
We ought to adopt the QI (a British panel show) way of looking at the world: Knowledge is interesting* and teachers must be free to be the salesmen for knowledge.
*Example: For the first 21 years of basketball’s existence, no one had thought to cut a hole in the bottom of the basket.
Differentiate is right, the drop out crisis is not fixable. It is endemic to the system that created it. Throwing more money at schools does not work (we’ve tried it). Draconian accountability does not work (we’ve tried that). Standards do not work (we’ve tried that). Having university professors train teachers and administrators does not work (we’ve tried that). My advise is to do anything possible to go outside that system and disrupt it.
I fear education is this country is doomed and we are heading for another Dark Age. This culture does not value learning and knowledge, instead opting for emphasizing “soft skills” (interpersonal communication, team building, emotional awareness, technological consumerism) from very young ages. The rotten apple of “child-centered” and “whole child” education espoused by Dewey has — 100 years later — spoiled the entire barrel. Want proof? Check out Invisible Serfs Collar blog, where a highly educated lawyer with a passion for education and history has connected the dots. It is truly depressing, but enlightening, reading.
The only thing that will save American education is going back to first principles: 1) Make schools a place for the dispersal of knowledge NOT for social engineering (or social justice, or social whatever). 2) Make education after 8th grade voluntary. Tie eligibility for welfare programs conditional on the amount of education completed. 3) Provide secondary vocational and academic programs available for all. No sorting exams, you can drop (or flunk) out at any time.
Agreed. Only, by tying money to ed. level completed you set up a consumer model wherein the institution is the “bad guy” if the kid doesn’t reach and meet the standards for completion. Thus, failure is still not the negative reinforcer that it is for successful kids but, remains the “repressor” that it becomes when viewed from a victim’s point of view.
I’m with you on your first first principle – schools are a place to disperse knowledge, and that’s what they should focus on, not any of the rest of what they try to do these days. I know the old ‘back to basics’ sounds archaic, but we have to give our students the fundamental tools they need, along with a sense of personal responsibility, instead of the entitlement mentioned by another responder. I know a woman on the Target Foundation board who says they saw the most successful schools – with the lowest dropout rate – in poor, underprivileged areas where the schools had the least ‘resources.’ Resources as in high tech physical things. Instead, the resources they had were human – teachers who really wanted to make a difference, who worked hard at relationships with students and who demanded much of their students AND were allowed to focus on the basics of education – reading, writing and math. If my five grown children were entering school today, I would be homeschooling them as I’m fed up with the excesses and failures of the American educational system. I teach college English and I’m appalled at the miserable skills demonstrated by more than half of my students. So to stop the drop, go back to teachers who are allowed to teach basics, and demand more of students.
Miss Friday, I’m glad you got all my points. I concur with yours as well, including the “soft skills” you spoke of. Again, it’s more feel-good nonsense implemented by feel-good types. It’s destroying the education system and this country as a whole. It’s the same people who push crap like “There’s no losers. Everyone is a winner!”. That unrealistic wishy-washy nonsense is setting these kids up with a sense of enlightenment. Then their world really crashes once they enter the REAL world.
How do we fix the drop out rate? End compulsory schooling. Done. (Dusts off hands.)
“But wouldn’t that just be the same corrupt model we currently use with “social promotion, Mr. Thinker?” Why, yes. It would. Unless . . .
So the problem is cultural, economic, and existential. The problem isn’t “drop outs”, the problem is “buy-in”. Schools work at cross purposes. The institution purportedly is a counter-cultural machine of “enlightenment” designed and operated by people just as fucked up as the one’s they serve. That is, we want readers but think we can embrace literary destroying high-tech. We want well rounded, critical thinkers, but organize the system like its a business that stress efficiency and production.
Details of the fire-hose we are pissing into.
CUTURE: Consumer, market centric ideology producers self-centered sloth. The Spectacle that is media and high-tech is designed to maintain the consumer ideology that reinforcers the delusions of grandeur that are particularly debilitating to those in “society” or “the community” especially ill-prepared to defend the ego against such oppressive market oriented techniques. Thus, education is far from central here. Rather, the poor and middle classes do not even know that they are being screwed economically, psychologically, and emotionally. Read both Farenheight 451 & Brave New World for literary treatments on the disease that is mass culture. Then look to Jacques Ellul’s, The Technological Society.
ECONOMIC: Market Neo-Liberalism; the “I got to get mine” paradigm of economic expropriation, dislocation, and exploitation. These poor folks have had the economy ripped out from under them. The poor in America are and have been living in a Second Great Depression for along time. They are imprisoned for it and like a junkie, given just enough subsidies and low wage work to keep them coming back to “The Man” for sustenance. They do not have the skills, knowledge, or communitarian orientation to organize and work toward more self-suffiecient alternatives. Nor do they have the foresight to avoid the snares of poverty such as the drug trade and consumption. This endemic poverty of both the material condition and spirit is not limited to the under-class but is most acutely experienced by them. This economic exploitation produces a sense of self that wallows in a victimization and weakness. Exactly what “The Man” wants.
EXISTENTIAL: The cultural delusions, economic exploitation, and this spiritual/emotion poverty produce a people incapable of resisting or building alternatives. There is no hope, no purpose, and thus nothing but jail and grinding poverty. Or the military; “Gee, thanks.”
You want to “solve” the drop out rate? Really? Then it is mass society and its cultural and material snares you must fight. Nothing short of a cultural, social, economic, and communitarian centric revolution will do. You can not look to to the racket that is politics to fix things. Politics is designed to fuck shit up.
Turn off the screens. Turn toward one another. Turn toward the Garden. Turn toward love. Eat well. Love well. And there will be no need for playing the games of those that seduce you, thus reduces you, and therefore are able to induce you to produce for them.
Peace, brothers and sisters. You are doing god’s work.
I watched a movie some months ago called “Idiocracy”. It’s a comedy from 2006. It takes place in the future and, to put it simple, everyone is an idiot!! Though meant to be a comedy, I fear it may just be the reality of our future.
So I am lucky enough to teach in one of the few decent, human districts left (it’s in rural Iowa). We actually did find a solution to the dropout problem – we divide each grade up into groups of 20 or so and they get a teacher who sees them for 45 minutes or so every day of their high school career. They eat one lunch shift and are in their advisory class for the other two. We do lots of things in these groups, and the teacher becomes like a parent. We have access to their grades and can harass them about homework completion. This is a huge pain in the ass, but it really works. You develop a relationship with these kids and become like their parent at school, sometimes a more involved parent than the one they live with. Our dropout rate has plummeted precisely because every kid is guaranteed to have one teacher with whom they form a relationship. To drop out, they have to explain it to that teacher and most don’t want to do that. Again, this is a lot of work and a huge pain, but it’s now so ingrained in our culture that people time their retirements around their group’s graduation. So it works. Just a thought.
I like that idea. The advisory route is a tough one, though. My school did a really half-assed job of this, but the goal was the same. It was really awful. Advisory meets once per week for about 45 minutes and there are usually really dumb activities planned which I would never do. But even if I did, advisory never really got off the ground until the middle of October, was done by May, and would be preempted by anything and everything. I would be lucky to know all their names by January. So, I think advisory has a lot of potential to be useful, but it requires the commitment you describe, not what we did.
Thank you Mr. Teachbad, and everyone else who told me that I was better than what the scary lady who runs the school says about me! Today was my last day because I found another job. Why? Mr. Teachbad website made me realize I can change nothing other than my own life. 13 years ago I thought I was going to revolutionize the way math was being taught, i.e. use math songs, dances, chants, lots of moving around the room by the students to energize the youth of America to love math! I’m glad I finally woke up. The revolution has been crushed. (So it was just a revolt or an uprising, probably not even worth mentioning.)
I thought I would be a little sad or nostalgic. Hells no! I am going to be treated like a regular human being again. Teaching math in high school takes about 12 to 14 hours a day. Not to mention the job tricks your mind into thinking people give a shit about what you are saying. No. Administrators, parents, students, and even sometimes other fucking teachers, treat you like a slave and only care about: “What’s the grade?”
I did the math: 180 days a year x 4 hours extra a day=720 hours divided by 8 hours = 90 days. I only get 45 days off in the summer. Goodbye Mother Fuckas!
Farewell, Friend. Congratulations on the exit and the new job. Come see us every now and again. Have a great summer; hpe you get some time off in between.
Teachbad
MF, Glad to hear you found a way out of the hellish world of teaching. Enjoy a future of being treated like a human being!! :O)
Maybe that’s the key. We can take our overqualified asses out of teaching and into the (other) workforce. When we take all their jobs since all of their degrees are in psychology, business administration and “behavioral sciences”. When they’re unemployed, they’ll have to resort to the vast summer of open teaching positions, where they’ll suck. Once enough people have done that, teaching will be given the respect it deserves, salaries and working conditions will go up and we can go back and scoop up those jobs with our MAs in Pedagogy and Curriculum.
Or they’ll TFA every district, put the little shits in dorm-like abandoned (then renovated) hotels and all the rich kids will go to private and international schools, just like all of the other banana republics.
Lots of typos. But it’s 1am here, so who cares?
Good luck, MF. I’m right behind you, as soon as my house closes escrow. Goodbye filthy city. Goodbye inner city school. Goodbye cockroaches and mice that I share my workspace and bathroom with on a daily basis. Goodbye parents who can’t read. Goodbye nitpicking administrators! Goodbye.
Here’s a funny video. My mom sent it. She feels our pain…
Ahhh…Teacher Appreciiation Week. Thats what we call it in Hillsborough Co Florida. I believe it was my less than overwhelmed, reaction to our Principals gift of Post-It notes with the schools name on it. It was made known to her that I described the expenditure of funds for this as silly and insulting. I couldnt resist making fun of the teachers who drooled all over themselves in gratitude for the giift of school supplies. She called me into the office on that one.
go you!!!!
Thanks to John Taylor Gatto, I’ve been thinking about the rationale for compulsory education. Legally compelling kids to attend public school…to learn, essentially…doesn’t strike me as the most motivating foundation for engagement. I’m not smart enough to completely dissect this issue, though.
As I’ve commented before, I’m on leave going on disability because teaching stress tried to kill me. Yet, I’m still in the loop somehow and and got the “officical scores for my students end of year district assessments – they are being taught by a very competent, caring, very young long term sub who can’t get hired due to cutbacks. There were 3 C’s , 5 D’s and 144 F’s. I shit you not. “It is “optional” to include’ the districts test (its 11th gtrade English FYI. If it was required, the entire 11th grade would flunk. God forbid they be held accountable. But you all know damn well that it will count against this poor young gifted teacher. (She’s better than me I think, and I’m pretty good)
Yes, in a typical school, admin takes credit for the positives WE do, yet places the blame on US instantly when scores flop.
It’s selective accountability and that will NEVER change.
Why do you so quickly write of juking the stats? You are aware that will be the solution, no? If this were some alternate universe, I’d become a inner-city principal, then institute the following policy:
In order to give a student a final grade of D or E (we would have Es, since you know, F makes people feel bad), a teacher must submit this 12 page form, in triplicate along with video evidence that the parent was informed about a possible student failure. Present in the video must be the teacher, parent, student, administrator, superintendent, pope and the ghost of Horace Mann. The video must be submitted in .avi, .mov and .doc format (yes, need to submit your video as a Word Document).
The graduation rate would go to 100%, and they’d put me on the cover of Time!
You what’s really scary? That hypothetical policy will probably look not half-bad within the next decade or so.
Indeed, one thing consistent with the Department of Education is this: Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does….and ten-fold.