Tweet
There is a major crisis going on in America. If we do not avert this crisis we may see the destruction of America as we know it. We will no longer be able to compete with other countries, thousands more people will be unemployed, our cities will become centers for poverty, violence and drug addiction.
No, this crisis is not our financial crisis or the collapse of of the auto industry. This crisis is way more severe than either of those. The crisis is the collapse of the urban educational system, a crisis has been swept under the rug by the American media and government for years.
The urban education crisis is hardly a new one for years the American government has neglected the educational needs of the poor African Americans and Latinos who occupy many of our city centers.
It is no coincidence that the cities with the highest drop out rates also have the highest crime rates and highest murder rates. Students who are unable to obtain quality educations find opportunities in the world of drugs and crime. The cycle continues from one generation to another, in poor neighborhoods with poor schools plagued by by crime and no opportunity gives birth to another generation with the same problem.
Bailing out the urban educational system is not just a money problem. For too many years Americans have fought against things, communism, drugs poverty isn’t it time to fight for something? If Americans are to solve this problem first we must realize what a major problem it is and realize that the future of our country is at stake. As in most problems the solution must come from hard work, innovation as well as funding.
By baling out the urban education system we would not only reduce the crime rate, relieve our overcrowded jails and provide jobs for inner cities, we will also be breaking the cycle that keeps poor people of color in the same neighborhoods, repeating the same cycles of violence, drugs and poverty.
We have seen the heights a person of color can reach when given the proper education and opportunities in Barack Obama. How many future leaders, innovators, artists and businessman turn to crime or despair because of a lack of educational opportunities.
As someone who has worked in the some of the worst schools in Boston and the South Bronx, I’ve seen the overcrowded classrooms, the over-stressed, unprepared teachers, the metal detectors at the door, the gangs and lack of art and athletic programs to keep students interested in school. However I’ve also seen the desire to learn, the thirst for knowledge and the belief in the USA as a beacon of opportunity.
In Baltimore last year, students went on a hunger strike to protest the cuts in after school programs. John McCain said one thing that I agreed with during the campaign and that was that education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. While de jure segregation has been gone for more then 50 years from our public school system, the system is still inherently separate and unequal.
The few blacks and latinos lucky enough to live in neighborhoods with decent school systems have a fair chance at the American dream, the masses who are trapped in inner cities with few routes out. Because property taxes fund school systems, rich neighborhoods get lots of money to fund their schools while poor neighborhoods are forced to suffer, creating a class and race based form of de facto segregation.
Bailing out the urban education system will take more than money. It will take people willing to sacrifice and believe in the future of this country. If Obama can inspire people to work for him to get elected hopefully he will be able to inspire people to follow his lead and work as community organizers in urban neighborhoods.
Here’s some of the national High school Drop out Rates According to The Wall St. Journal
Baltimore: 65% of all students drop out
Chicago: 45% of all students drop out
Columbus: 60% of all students drop out
Detroit: 75% of all students drop out
Los Angeles: 43% of all students drop out
New York: 53% of all students drop out
Here’s a Music Video I Did With Some of My Former Students in the South Bronx About the Drop Out Crisis
The Movement: Droppin Out
84 Comments
While I generally agree with the gist of this post, I would posit that one of the issues is that we assume in the US that kids stay in school for an entire 12 years, while other countries such as Germany and the Netherlands have “outs” where kids can be finished with their education at the 9th or 10th grade level and then receive apprenticeships within the workplace when they are 16 and 17 years old.
All kids are not academically gifted, some are better with their hands. Why don’t we educate some of our children on that premise, that is to each their own ability? When we try to be all things to all people, it often doomed to failure.
What do you suggest be done to stop the drop out rate? Sure spending more money is good but how do we spend the money?
Year round schooling? School breakfast and lunch programs kids can’t concentrate if they are hungry, healthy vegan food?
Hot lunch *cough* meat cannot be good for kids.
Arts programs drawing, painting pottery etc, Vocational ed programs electronics, auto repair, metal working, drafting, home ec, etc.
Save money by dropping sports teams instead require everyone does 4 years of gym class
Make money on school buses use the buses to pick up people when they are not picking up kids in areas that need buses like cities.
Awesome video – hope this gets the wider audience it deserves.
The entire state of Texas will be calling for your head!
The simple, absolutely effective means of improving educational experience in schools has been known for years; smaller class size. The greater attention a teacher can pay to a 15-20 students vs. 30+ students is self-evident and counteracts many of the other issues, such as teacher demoralization, etc. But it costs money and as a society we haven’t decided we are going to earnestly prioritize the young people who are our collective and only future. Families and communities of course have to be supported, but if you are talking only about the (public) schools themselves, we should invest the money needed to bring class size down… Browse the catalogues of high-end private schools and the one thing you won’t see is a large classroom packed with kids.
Change the social dynamic in highschool somehow smart kids can’t wait to go to college, dark and or poor kids don’t wait to drop out.
Dropping out of high school does predict failure in life quite well but the Al Bundy peak in highschool types rule high school and then they never do anything afterward its like a predictor of mediocrity.
Failure and success = Failure and Mediocrity if you escape high school and go to college your odds for success increases.
A highschool system where the values favor the people who will go to college and encourage people to stay in school would be better than the current system.
They hate doing push ups and running for 4 years of highschool that bad just how out of shape are they?
Anyway football should be for fun
Smaller class size I like it any numbers for average improvement between larger and smaller classes?
Very good point on the class size.
I don’t know how simple it is, though. Simple if we payed enough money, if we passed school levies (we don’t in my city, hardly any have passed in the 20+ years I’ve been here).
This country, its leaders and its owners have no more inclination to improve inner city or suburban sprawl education systems for the betterment of the poor than they had to do Katrina right.
I’d go so far as to suggest the opposite is their intent, and I think we’ve enough evidence at hand since Reagan was Governor of CA (’67-’75) to demonstrate that intent.
The wealth is transferred up, very little trickles down and it’s pretty obvious the few get it all and the many get nothing.
I don’t see that changing soon.
We’ll see in two years if PE Obama really intends that level of change, but I doubt it. That would be a huge revolution, and the 1% don’t suffer revolution well, as history shows . . . . and airplanes fall from the sky.
Didn’t Bush 1 say something about smaller class size not correlating with better grades? Then his son Bush 2 gave us No Child Left Behind:(
In order to accomodate citizens who are not academic, the economy must be able to provide jobs for them. Rampant immigration and outsourcing means that there is no political will in the U.S. to do that.
I live in Athens, GA. The schools are quite good and we have the highest dropout rate in the state. My dissertation was about the GED and dropouts and one of my conclusions was that dropping out of school was a very good decision for many. (disclaimer, I dropped out and joined the Army on my 17th birthday in 1966)
True the inbred elite do not want their kids to compete against poor kids with an almost equal education.
Only in a stacked for the rich system can an imbecile like Bush dream of being President.
Here’s something…
Ok I thought that dropping out of highschool was bad at least for your wallet? Dropping out is good for you how?
Thank you for this post, Casey. I am an adult educator who spend many years working in adult literacy programs – helping the people that could not function or could not learn in the K-12 system. Based on the stories I heard from my students over the years, there are a lot of reasons that students quite school. Personal trauma, undiagnosed and untreated learning disabilities and ADHD, educational techniques that did not work for tactile learners, discouragement after years of failure, abusive and/or incompetent teachers, bullying, curricula that were not relevant for their goals. The reasons are many and no single change will solve the problem.
I cannot overstate the effect that years of academic failure has on the self-esteem of children and young people, and these effects linger into adulthood. It is hardly surprising that they do not volunteer for more years of the same. What I had to do first when these learners came back to school as adults were to honour them and their experience, to find out what they wanted to learn, to convince them that they could learn, provide opportunities for meaningful successes, help them understand their learning styles/preferences, and teach them how to learn in ways that worked for them.
I heartily agree with Japandrew – too many learners in too small a physical space does not support learning.
One more point – it appears that the dropouts are predominantly young men, and that men are not doing all that well in post-secondary education either.
As the mother of a son for whom there was no education system that was compatible with him, I am completely puzzled by what to do. Also, when I was in elementary school (8th grade in 58) we had classrooms of 30+ kids, and the IQs (I have the list for my 8th grade as my mother worked in Pupil Personnel) ranged from 82 to 142. I didn’t like school, as I was bored, but I learned, and the low-IQ sorts did not disrupt. So I am still completely puzzled as to why it is so much more difficult today than a half a century ago.
Thanks I bookmarked it.
it’s going to take a lot of money. i don’t believe the thugs will put up with it but it’s worth a try. this means bringing all schools up to par, especially those in the ghetto. the burbs can take care of themselves.
I know that people here make fun of the “hope” in Obama’s message but if AA and Hispanic kids look at him and think “I might be able to do that” it all will have helped our country a lot. Hopeless kids drop out of school.
In Georgia we have the Hope Scholarship rightly called a tax on the stupid (lottery) to pay for middle class kids (because it is based on grades). The dropout “crisis” has been one for about 40 years and basically nothing has changed.
Hi Raven!
I sometimes think that the best thing that can be done is provide lots of educational opportunities for people when they are ready to go back to school.
I depends on the person. A high school education is “necessary but not sufficient” for success and some of the issues that kids face in school make it a good decision to get out and figure out another path.
As a member of a disadvantaged group, I would caution that hope stemming from ONE extraordinary member of your group making it might have blowback, when ordinary members of the group find that their road to the top is not so smooth.
What was the drop out rate? What was the number of problem kids sent to the problem kids school or small school bus for special kids?
How is your son doing now are there programs for kids like him now?
Adults look at him and think Hope too:)
necessary but not sufficient” for success
What is sufficient and what can we do to encourage it?
Oh, I might also mention that school is not only incompatible with my son, but also with me. I am an autodidact. I have never had the insights in school that I have experienced via my own learning. Not suggesting me as a model for the overall education system, but perhaps useful as a precautionary tale.
BTW, my comments are in no way meant to challenge this post. It is right on.
There was some disturbing research about declining US high school graduation rates in the US. A nice summary is in link below.
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
James J. Heckman Paul A. LaFontaine
13 February 2008
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/930
There is also research showing that half of the growing gender gap in post-secondary enrollment and performance, both technical and academic, is related to high male HS drop out rates. That research is mentioned in the link above.
I read once that Heckman was a “stolid, old-fashioned, conservative”. Not sure that that was supposed to mean. But he won Nobel Memorial Prize for his work in econometrics, and Wikipedia says he started advising Obama during the campaign. So Heckman is good high-tech university wonk centrist to rely on for trustworthy analysis.
i am more encouraged everytime i hear him speak off the cuff. it is such a pleasure to listen to two or more sentences put together to form an idea. we have been starved for the past 8.
Tough to define isn’t it. Cameron and Heckman, in their, “The Non-Equivalence of High School Equivalencies” looked strictly at the earnings of dropouts, GED grads and traditional grads and determined (from a small cohort of urban AA males) that dropouts and GED were closer together than GED’s and trad grads. What I wanted to look at was the meaning of the experience of deciding to go back and getting a GED to the people that did it. I did that by, shock, asking them! Crazy idea huh.
I’m not Raven (obviously), but I have to say that overall, the current generation of young adults entering the workforce is not having an easy time of it – and I think that an education that does prepare people for work is not serving them very well.
I also think we are seeing significant generational differences from earlier cohorts, and the school system has not figured out how to deal with the latest crop yet.
1. My son, a college graduate (don’t ask me how) is a failure.
2. Don’t know what happened to Victor Cane, the 82 IQ in my 8th grade. Don’t even know how to find out what happened to him.
3. More than a decade ago, my twin nieces who teach HS English in the NYC public school system invited me to the 3000 breakfast with all the pooh-bahs. The Q&A involved 3 mikes where questioners lined up. Every other one was an advocate for special ed and they already comsumed 1/4 of ed budget, a real mafia. Think they were the opposite of helpful.
My dad was second dumbest in his grade school class humiliation was used to control his class there was no discipline problem.
He did learn though and became an Engineer my Dad said the dumbest kid committed suicide latter on in life.
Teen suicide would likely go up if we went back to the old model. We need a new model smaller class size might help.
Yea, and he was the methodologist for “The Bell Curve”. In the study I cite above he wrote that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” in reference to GED grads. I thought about that when I walked across that stage and got my skin. Screw him.
Necessary but not sufficient. I would ask you this, is he a failure in his own eyes?
The most powerful video I’ve ever seen on this subject….WOW and thanks for this posting!
So you looked at what the subjects considered important what besides money which the other guys were looking at did they seem to value most?
If you haven’t watched “The Wire” you should. The 4th season focuses on schooling and reminds me of the video. It’s wrenching, you keep hoping some of the kids will get out from under it.
Think the stats are that teen suicide rates are rising, not falling, so not sure that going back to old methods would raise it more, since dismantling old system seems to have had opposite influence.
Not saying there’s cause & effect, just that if there is, it is not obvious.
I found this helpful summary of info re: the relationship between class size and outcomes.
http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE…..ports.html
Another comment regarding vocational training. We are supposed to be a capitalist, entrepreneurial society, but our education system doesn’t provide the most basic literacy in how this system actual works (and how to make it work for you).
Why, for example, did my public high school education (graduated 1975) not include any of the following skills: how to balance a checkbook; how compound interest works (for or against you); how to write a resume; how to look for a job; how to interview for one; how a mortgage is structured, etc.? And on the political front: basic statistical literacy, how to analyze the polling that is so central to our system. The idea of education as empowerment toward how society actually functions is sorely missing. No doubt related to the fact that people who understand how the system actually works can retool it to their own vision and needs.
Ever read the
a bunch of scholars went over the very questionable methodology of the
.
I felt like it was a freshmen college students warning list of how not to write a paper.
True there are several causes I was just citing one case I should not have implied a statistical correlation.
Yea, my goal was to have my “research participants” define success themselves rather than me putting a framework on them. Understand that this was qualitative research, Cameron and Heckman would roll over laughing, and was not meant to make broad statements about the topic. I had two young women, one black one white. They were both basically hounded out of school for having cross-racial friendships. They dropped out and went back though Adult Ed a couple of years later and got on with their lives. One woman promised her son she would get her GED if he would stay in school. They were awesome people, just like the guys I was in Vietnam were after they got railroaded into the Army because “the best and the brightest” had deferment. Bitter? Nahhhh.
And why do you need anyone to teach you how to balance a check book, or how to shop for bargains? All this seems so obvious to me, I don’t see why you have to teach it in schools or at home.
OTOH, one of my teacher nieces tells me that I am being stupid (Raven take note) and judgemental, because I assume that things are as easy for others as they are for me.
Yup. Scumbags, but they got numbers.
I’m surprised. You must know about Howard Gardner and the theory of Multiple Intelligences?
Read the book Bell Curve Wars they cooked the numbers plus its small and a fun read I love it when the evil doers get raked!
OT
Rachel is really prcious tonight about the “august” senate.
I won’t call you judgmental and stupid, but I will call you mistaken!
There are many people who do indeed need to be taught how to do these things.
Bitter After Bush we are all laughing at the best and brightest with their war plans, economic plans, etc etc The Emperor has no Clothes and we are Laughing when we are not Crying at seeing them nakid.
Don’t really know about it, but am tangetially familiar. Here’s my problem. Even if there are multiple intelligences, how does one take advantage, i.e., what is the structure or mechanism that leads to those of unusual learning methods to succeed. Seems to me there are none.
How about taking what people have a strength in and use that to improve other domains?
Why are those life-necessary tasks so difficult for some to learn, and why is it that we didn’t know that was a problem until roughly 1970 or 1980?
None of these skills came easily to me. I’m not suggesting a dumbing down of curriculum, but why not link the study of maths to real life problems? Not to blame the victims, but basic economic literacy would have helped a lot of people stay away from predatory mortgage schemes…
In what sense was Heckman the methodologist for “The Bell Curve”? That book is based on a series of pretty basic statistical errors that people like Heckman do not make, regardless of their ideology, and Heckman wrote a very damning review of the book. So maybe you are confusing him with some one else.
I’m not sure your interpretation of of Nonequivalence of HS Equivalents paper is fair.
Yeah I can do those things but I sucked at shop class I got C’s because I aced the tests. Metal 1 and 2, auto Mech 1 and 2, Drafting, Electronics 1.
I admit I had no plan for the future and further School was my fallback position.
You do things besides the dismal science, right? But you apply what you know and know how to do to other aspects of your life? Teachers can help students learn to do the same thing.
How do you do that? What is the social mechanism? This is an area where I am a moron, so I am looking for a response that sez 1, 2, 3, i.e. lays it out symplisitically.
So I am still completely puzzled as to why it is so much more difficult today than a half a century ago.
That’s easy. The teachers have very little power, they are at the mercy of the parents and a craven administration, and parents, despite all the cosmetic protestations to the contrary, don’t really care all that much about education.
You want to ‘fix’ education? Enact tough laws against parents whose kids don’t do well and make no effort to address this problem. The first time, $5,000 fine. The second time, jail. Oh, and give teachers the power to expel disruptive students, and to flunk them without mercy.
I am, as it should be readily apparent to all, one of those liberal wussy teacher folk.
one reason might be that we as a society have developed an underclass. those who are gifted with IQ or environment or status have different learning paths.
Well, I always thougt that economics was a lot easier than science, my orignial field.
I’m familiar with the possibilities of having math problems couched in terms applicable to real life. But think plenty of that has been done to determine that’s not the core problem.
Actually, it’s not all that hard, particularly with adult learners – though I don’t know why you couldn’t do this in K-12 as well.
1. Give them opportunities to reflect on how they learn and what their affinities are.
2. Give them language to talk about how they learn and what their strengths are.
3. Genuinely respect them for how they learn and what they know. Communicate this respect until they “get it”.
4. Help them identify learning strategies that work for them.
5. Give them choices about what and how they learn and empower them to make choices.
6. Do ongoing reflection with them about what and how they learned and how it worked/didn’t work and what they could do differently next time.
6. Use lots of different ways of teaching.
So we should submit ourselves to the mafia of the teacher’s union?
Because the world in which adults must function has gotten more complex?
Because in your adult life you have not had a lot to do with people for whom these things are difficult?
Depends on who defines necessary I showed my brother how to change the oil on his car. I kept telling him to change the oil but still he seized the engine.
Granted he was better than me at traditional school knowledge.
And how do you do outcomes assessment?
I’d be willing to admit that shortcomings of some have been underappreciated. Would like evidence, however.
Its harder to be socially literate today because society is so much more complex and fluid that it used to be. A few hundred years ago, a child learned all the employment skills they needed watching their parent farm or forge. In my parents’ generation if you had a college education you found employment upon graduation and could reasonably expect to stay with that employer for the duration. Our generation (I’m 50) can expect to go through several employers (including oneself) and maybe a major shift in fields. Kids in school now are learning communications technologies that didn’t exist when we were young and will live and work in a technological landscape beyond any of our imaginings.
My experience with literacy learners and math was that they often knew how to do some basic computation but often didn’t understand the underlying basic concepts and didn’t know, or hadn’t been taught, how to apply what they knew to concrete problem solving.
I can’t find that phrase about the sow’s ear in the Equivalents paper, and I don’t see that kind of sentimement either. It is a cautious paper. Cameron and Heckman don’t find any relationship between other measures of ability and the problem with GED holders’ lack of success compared to HS graduates, so I don’t see where they are saying people who get GEDs are dumb. I don’t see where they look much into the reason why GED holders’ don’t have work history of HS graduates.
You know, I think you are right on that.
In terms of the paper, as my chair pointed out, don’t quibble with their findings. The problem was that the language they used was extremely negative about the population. In addition the study was picked up by the media and trumpeted as a end-all and be-all of GED “Outcome Studies”. I had the fortune to do an “Annotated Bibliography of GED Outcome Studies” and the results were much more encouraging. I suppose they did me a favor b giving me a topic but I don’t think people who seek a second chance need to be dismissed.
I’ll have to go back to my diss to find the reference, let’s touch base on it. I gotta crash.
No disrespect intended, but I’m out of it. Good nite everyone.
By monitoring learning behaviours as they became more independent and successful as learners.
You may be right about the tone, I don’t have time to reread it in detail now. You are right that Heckman was very critical of various kinds of compensatory and other community education interventions for awhile, and maybe he himself conflated that with his GED results, which I think is not justifiable at all.
I have been skeptical of Heckman’s policy proposals in the past, and separate them from the face value of the statisical results.
One thing not mentioned here is the appointment of Arne Duncan –as was noted in a previous blog, Duncan is head of a failing school system in Chicago. He was taken to task by parents and teachers for setting schools up to fail. He believes in No Child Left Behind –which is set up to NOT teach kids how to think critically and creatively.
And yet, Obama thinks he’s grand.
The most disturbing part is that Duncan and Rahm Emanuel are in favor of making the public schools into military schools. This should make people sit up and take notice.
Time will tell, but I don’t see that the educational system in the country will be turned around with Obama.
OK, he’s the paper I was talking about “An Annotated Bibliography of GED Outcome Studies” It seems as if the “silk purse” comment was in “an early draft”. I will not argue that this is not verifiable. I also was mistaken about Heckman being the “methodologist”
Hawking (1995):
Heckman is well known in the field of labor economics. . . . His name was the first mentioned in the acknowledgments in the Bell Curve, where he was among those praised for giving the authors’ creative advice in dealing with methodological problems” (Hernstein & Murray, 1994, p. xxv).