The National Center for Dropout Prevention (NCDP) sponsored the 2011 Educational Strategies and Student Engagement Institute in St. Petersburg Florida this week. In addition to presenting (on the role of data based decision making to make dropout prevention efforts more efficient, effective, and successful) I got to attend a number of sessions.
Boy, did I learn a lot.
If a store announced that it would provide merchandise to 70% of the people who paid for it, would we accept it? If a car company announced that you could buy a car that would get your to 70% of the places you wanted to drive, would they stay in business?
Yet we now live in a society where only 70% of children graduate high school; and of those almost half cannot read or calculate at a 12th grade level. Is this acceptable? Is this what we want for the US?
Most students do not drop out because of academics. In fact 60% of all dropouts have grades of C or better; 80% have grades of D or better. So efforts at just fixing "school" or "education" are bound to fail.
One of the factors most used to predict the likelihood of dropping out is school attendance. Schools make efforts to contact parents, contact the child, counsel the child, but these rarely work on high school kids. And attendance is really just the symptom, it's not the problem. You often really have to attack the root causes of the problem, which generally are factors outside of school.
For example, if a student goes into Juvenile detention for two weeks, he or she comes back too far behind schoolwork to catch up without individual help. If a student is faced with the choice of working or losing his or her apartment, school is going to take a back seat. If a student has a child and no day care, he or she can't just leave the baby and come to class, and day-care programs for teen moms are one of the earliest victims of government education cutbacks. If a student goes home to a house where the electricity has been turned off for nonpayment, how can he or she complete his homework?
There are no easy answers, and we cannot expect the school alone to solve these problems.
If a kid lives in poverty and attends a school with other kids in poverty, if they are one year behind in reading by 3rd grade, if they have been retained, then in most districts, that child has a zero percent chance of graduating high school.
When poverty is so correlated with low academic achievement, how do some schools achieve success? It's only in the last ten years that we have started to understand the differences between kids growing up in poverty and those who are not.
We heard about Perry County, the poorest county in Alabama and one of the poorest in the country. How have they been able to achieve 98% graduation rates and 75% college admissions for their high school graduates? We heard about success stories from Portchester, NY; Dayton's Bluff Elementary school in Saint Paul, MN, Taft Elementary School in Boise, ID, and Osmond A. Church School in Queens, NY.
Lesson 1: We need to modify our goals. It's not just that we want kids to graduate with a high school degree. We want them prepared to lead productive lives: work, become a functioning member of the community, and contribute to the common good. And when we make the goals low, our lowered expectations permeates their lives. If we don't give those kids higher expectations, they will never gain hope.
We need to rid ourselves of remedial programs that keep expectations low; by watering down the curriculum, we are not helping the students; in fact, we are ensuring that their reading, writing, and math skills will never reach the levels they need to. Successful schools in poverty areas provide needing kids help so that they can succeed in mainstream and advanced classes.
Lesson 2: We need to rethink how we support kids, especially the kids without family support networks, so that they see the relevance of school to that overarching goal, and so that they get the resources they need to navigate system to obtain those resources. Children of poverty need the community, and we need to involve the community not just the schools, to provide the resources that they cannot get at home.
Lesson 3: Most at-risk kids want more than anything else is a relationship with a caring adult. Children of poverty generally do not have the social capital to navigate through school and society to obtain the resources they need. They need that caring adult or group of adults to help them. The most obvious person is a school counselor, but these offices are generally understaffed, so they end up focusing only on the most successful and the most disruptive students. A number of presenters referred to a Community Action Team, mobilized to support each student.
Lesson 4: Get the students interested in college early, as early as elementary school. Make them see the relevance and the possibility of college. Many kids in poverty have never been to a college campus, never interacted with a college student, and have no college models or mentors. By middle school, they need to have the confidence to know that they are "good enough" to go to college, with a plan that they can review with a caring adult periodically. By high school, children of poverty need to start seeing what a strong high school transcript and college application look like, they and their parents need to understand how to fill out a financial aid (FAFSA) application that gives them the best chances of obtaining aid.
Lesson 5: Get the children involved in giving back and helping the community. HS students can help elementary kids with reading or math; there are tons of ways they can help the cognitively challenged, they can help kids whose parents are overseas stay in touch. When students are helping others, they have great self esteem, and they are more motivated to succeed in all facets of life, including academics.
Lesson 6: Schools can do a better job of using the information they already have to focus their resources on the interventions that are known to work. More than just an Early Warning System (EWS), this involves
- Pulling the data from myriad sources into one system that can analyze it
- Getting the information in actionable form to the people who are best able to act.
- Following their actions to know if they are taking place and are effective
- Recording and modifying procedures and algorithms based on knowing what is working, and what is not.
Today, about 1 in 4 children in the US are growing up in poverty. These tend to be the children who have the most likelihood of dropping out. I'm hoping that as a society we can start implementing these lessons and improve our ability to grow all children into productive, functional, and happy adults.
