Education is a vast enterprise, covering the scope of human existence. Currently our nations entire bureaucratic focus is to raise our test scores. This starts on a national scale and penetrates right down to the roots of each individual. Obviously, to increase test scores, you remove those who are pulling down the average.
Since our obsession with test scores has mushroomed, so has our dropout rate. More students are failing to graduate. Is there a correlation?
It seems from personal experience that as soon as a child has taken his last DSTP in March of his 10th grade year, he is considered a lame duck, and is left in educational limbo. Of course that is not true, all school administration officials will sound…..but for those skeptics I challenge them to compare the intensity that exists before the test to that of the educational process that occurs afterward.
So from society’s point of view, what good does it do to increase test scores marginally, even as we fail to graduate more of those same students? In energy talk…..we are drilling a dry well.
Since Delaware, due to the relationship of its size to its wealth, is the perfect laboratory to test this rethinking, we should begin debating the use of graduation rates to rank our schools.
But wait,…. some of the more astute will say. That is just what we did before testing and people were being passed to the next grade even though they were not ready? They are right. Graduation rates alone should not be the final word in ranking a school.
When struggling with a problem, it is always prudent to ask, 1) who is doing it right and 2) how can we do what they are doing. Reinventing the wheel is usually fun, but is always much more expensive than purchasing one cheap that does the job.
Except for the US, almost all other industrialized nations have a comprehensive exam that is taken post secondary school. We have two that could be used. The ACT and the SAT. Our higher educational institutions have relied on these two tests for half a century to determine the future potential of a high school graduate.
So what if we made the SAT mandatory? To be taken at the end of the senior year? For one, most college bound students have already taken it twice, so perhaps they may pull off their highest score yet……. 2) It is pre-standardized making the act of developing a separate state test nothing more than a waste of money. 3) It can be trained and taught within a curriculum that begins with the seventh grade. 4) Every student can be given the pre-study books out today that not only trains one on the questions that will be asked, but in the explanations provided, actually teaches how to solve the problems better than all but the most motivating teachers on the planet. 5). As a student graduates, the test score beside their name, gives future institutions a clear idea of whether they deserved to graduate.
Therefore, by streamlining the DSTP to blend and meet with the future criteria of the final Comprehensive Exam (SAT), we can use that data to determine and rate the effectiveness of each student, each teacher, each school, each district, each state, as well as the quality of our nation’s educational output compared to our intellectual rivals for future economic opportunities.
Now that we have a way of measuring results, it is time we get to the heart of the problem and figure out how to stem the drop out rate that is extremely high in schools where our poverty is the highest.
Again we turn to someone who has succeeded. The inner city district showing the most success is the Boston District. Basically they have found that it is rather cheap to target those individuals where intercession is needed, intercede, and follow through up to the point they graduate.
Delaware does well in the lower grades (K-5). Our problems develop first at the middle school level, and continue into the district’s high schools. Based on the inner city districts of other cities, we can be reasonably assured that if and when a Wilmington District is reborn, that it will have the highest drop out rate of all Delaware’s schools. Especially if nothing is done to intercede.
The intercession dollar amount tabulated in Boston was between 600 to 800 additional dollars needed per student. In Delaware this funding will need to come from other sources outside the current revenue flow patterns for our schools.
The Chicago school district study reveals an even finer point. Based on correlations with those who failed in freshman year or 9th grade, with those who failed to graduate, by interceding just with those failing or about to fail (D), one could make drastic reductions in the graduation failure rate, and increase the numbers of those continuing education beyond high school.
The most interesting facet of the study was this caveat. Interviews with 8th graders still showed strong positive outlooks towards their future. Many thought they were going to college, or getting a great job. But physical data directly shows that those who fail one grade in freshman year, will probably not go all the way to finish high school.
One failing grade during freshman year has not been considered critical. The student has three years left, they can make it up. But evidence shows that the tendency exists to fail another courses the next year and the year after that. It is the accumulative effect that disillusions most students who then fail to apply excessive effort.
100% success rate is a worthy goal, and may be achievable. However my concern is reducing the rate of drop outs.
What worked in Chicago was targeting those in freshman year who needed additional help, and giving it to them. Once they had the basics down pat in algebra, the tended to do well on their own in the upper classes.
Of course parents and society have a part to play in the ennui occurring in each student. But even those students who had nothing to go home to, if given proper respect, encouragement, and instruction at school, they too began to believe in themselves despite their economic surroundings.
This is just one head of Delaware’s hydra of educational problems. But for someone looking for a bang for the buck, and willing to donate substantial funds to do Wilmington’s poverty stricken schools some good, this intense focus on incoming high school freshmen, just might to the trick…………
Positivity works with children. Negativity works for wizened adults. Unless you turn an inner city school into a meaningful experience for each student who lives in an inner city environment, you give them no reason for wanting to succeed.
8 comments
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August 17, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Hube
Excellent commentary. I’d add that a no-nonsense/no-excuses discipline approach is also critical for the success of inner city schools. Making the necessary interventions just won’t work if the school environment is chaos (or near chaos). Unfortunately, too many “progressive” educators believe otherwise.
I don’t think this falls under your “negativity” definition in your last paragraph, either.
August 17, 2007 at 7:57 pm
kavips
Good point.
In a world of chaos and anarchy, just providing a form of structure, where events can occur predictably as they are supposed to, could be the positive influence that works to keep a child in school.
For no-nonsense/ no-excuses discipline to cross over into negativity, it needs only be perceived as being performed for the teacher’s benefit, and not the student’s. Any teacher worth their degree should be able to NOT let that happen…………
August 19, 2007 at 4:50 am
davidlanderson
Very commendable. I hope you continue on this thread of ideas.
August 19, 2007 at 11:38 pm
kavips
I certainly would like to. Anyway you could get your fellow republicans to refrain from wasting our money in Iraq? From costing us millions by subsidizing wealthy oil, pharmaceutical, and insurance executives to raise their prices on us even higher? From using Chinese money to fund two years worth of our budget?
In essence, if just 17(18) Republican Senators were to switch their votes on Impeachment, then I (and this nation) could get back to making real headway on real problems needing my(our) attention…education of our impoverished, cheap energy for our state’s future, and preservation of the uniqueness (control development) that makes Delaware a wonderful place to live.
What is needed is for republicans to become Republicans and say: you know……we are just spinning wheels here. We have gotten out and pushed this baby (Bush) as hard as we can. It is still going nowhere……..Who is charge of our party, anyway? Is it us, or this driver who swerved off the road and got us here in the first place, and then waved off all offers of assistance? It is time to move on and call the tow truck! Let us pursue our journey by another method. Of course doing so would mean putting your country’s best interest over the interest of your party………But as one much greater than myself once said: those who risk to lose all; shall gain all….
So how about it? How about some real pressure on Mike Castle? How about a real Republican to run against him? What are you doing next year? A moral Republican against this administration’s policies…..I think bipartisan Delaware would flock to such a person.
August 21, 2007 at 4:14 am
davidlanderson
You won’t have W to kick around soon. What will you talk about? 🙂
August 21, 2007 at 4:23 am
davidlanderson
I think the President has a good heart. As you know I have my differences, Katrina, execution of Iraq policy, medicare perscription drug company plan, no child left behind testing structure, energy policy, expanded domestic surv., the American Union, and a few other areas. Yet I also see a lot of good he has done as well. Since I have written about these I will leave them be so not to set your readers off :).
My view is that every administration has done some good and bad things. Now we need to look to the future. We need principled people who have a vision benefiting the people. We have some serious problems in America and we need to resolve them not dwell in the past except to learn from it.
August 21, 2007 at 5:37 am
kavips
Upon reflection (and due to another article I hope to post soon), based on the campaign of 2000, your caricature is not that far off.
To me, and historians will probably agree, that the fallacy of this Bush administration, will be that it had no defense against Cheney and the neocons. Seriously…. Cheney picked the running mate, picked the staff, became overseer of intelligence, and ran the energy policy.
Christine Whitman. God bless her. Paul O’Neil..God bless him….Colin Powell. God bless him….all would have contributed to a “most excellent administration” had they not been shut out around the cabinet table by Cheney…………………..Perhaps these three were token figureheads, to be replaced later, in order to make the administration look less threatening and more representative of America, after the inauguration , but I think not.
I think Bush thinks he made balanced decisions throughout his tenure, but history will prove, that all the information he had, was filtered through Cheney first. Example! One question that should have been asked but wasn’t: how do we control Iraq once we are in there?
Apparently Bush does not push back at proposals brought before him by Cheney; he is quick to judge, and quicker to act on those quick judgments……….
Had his campaign promises not been all quickly overturned, like the arsenic level in public water supplies that were immediately raised after taking office, the republican party just could have been facing a different outcome come 09.
August 24, 2007 at 6:39 pm
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