What we can do today to solve the dropout crisis
By Larry Brown — President - -WAVE, Inc.
At sixteen, Temo, from a migrant farm working family and a gang member,decided to drop out of school. Instead, he was encouraged to join a leadership program at his high school. At seventeen, Janice, a single mother from New Orleans, did drop out of school. Like Temo, she found a program, but this one for out of school youth. With adult support, respect, and an opportunity to put skills acquired on the street to work in a positive venue, they excelled. Twelve years later Temo is an elementary school principal and advisor to educators on how increase graduation rates and Janice and is a teacher. They could be the rule rather than the exception in schools across the nation.
Tuesday’s report by America’s Promise Alliance about the hemorrhaging of students from schools before achieving a diploma is a critical call to arms. Led by General and Mrs. Colin Powell; inspiring State Farm CEO, Ed Rust; and Alliance CEO Marguerite Kondracke, the press conference was packed with members of an educational choir who have sung in empty cathedrals for decades. Speakers repeatedly cited the seminal 1983 report A Nation at Risk, but none of us have been brave enough to say that in the 25 years since, we have failed! America’s Promise sets a compelling moral and economic agenda for the nation. Now it falls to every one of us to turn it into action.
Dropout summits, better data systems, increasing the age for compulsory school attendance, and establishing early warning systems represent a good beginning, but not a substitute for the effective innovation we can begin immediately!
More Head Start and pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten, and intense reading programs are the best dropout prevention strategies. There are equally promising practices for adolescents at imminent risk of dropping out. In fact, they could benefit every student and refresh many teachers as well. Let’s get started now!
- Resolve that neither students nor teachers are the problem. Youth, no matter how challenged, are the greatest untapped resource in education and can play a key role in school leadership. And teachers, no matter how frustrated, will excel if given the freedom to put effective developmental practice to work in their classrooms.
- Set high standards, but not without articulating the method by which they will be achieved. Schools labor under increased expectations and fewer resources, less time, and exceptional sanctions for failing to meet arbitrary, time defined goals. The result is a disincentive to keep low performing youth within their schools.
- Implement “bottom-up” strategies. Find solutions to problems without creating costly, complex responses. Small changes often produce the most profound outcomes. There is value in disseminating information about successful “best practices,” but rigid adoption should never be mandated. Give educators freedom to adapt and design their own solutions.
- Learn what the kids already know: networking is the currency of the future. Staff, students, parents, community organizations, and employers should all be built into a learning network both philosophically and technologically. It’s the ultimate leverage of resources.
- Get the first fifteen percent right. The late quality expert W. Edwards Deming proved that eighty-five percent of any outcome is determined by what is done during the first fifteen percent of a process. Effective early childhood education is proof. How about taking the first few weeks of school to establish a shared vision for an ideal school year, build teams, engage students as teachers, diffuse leadership, impart organizational skills, and plan for success. Every course should begin with a rigorous discussion of the “big why” of the course content.
- Every school should strike a partnership with one or more community-based organization and we should expect the school, community staff, and parents to be equally accountable for student success. Such an approach is working well with Chancellor Klein’s Multiple Pathways program in New York City.
- Follow the lead of companies like Capital One, Schering-Plough , AIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and others that provide financing of innovative school and community partnerships then get their employees directly involved.
- Help schools expeditiously evolve curricula from didactic to experiential. Youth learn from multiple media, social networks, and personal exchanges. Classrooms that fail to emulate such methods feel irrelevant to them.
- Freely alter the current school structure. The current system is not delivering, but it need not be discarded. It must, however, evolve. Small learning communities, year round schools, inquiry-based learning, community service, charter schools, academies, alternative schools, afterschool programs, and numerous other innovations should be encouraged, unencumbered by mandates for content-based standards.
Thirty years ago, futurist R. Buckminster Fuller predicted the world would accomplish most endeavors with fewer resources at an increasingly faster pace. He has been proven accurate in technology, communications, transportation, economics, and myriad other domains, even politics. Yet, we have seen only a hint of it in education. Bringing such increases in productivity to scale in schools requires the national outrage invoked by Ed Rust, the courage to make change at the heart and not just the margins, and small actions taken today, not tomorrow. As we do so, we will make school a place where students want to be and create generations of educators like Temo and Janice.
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