Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University, in an article in the New York Times, offers some sensible and proven ideas about how to cut dropouts among the most vulnerable students.
The likely dropouts can be identified as early as sixth grade, he writes, by attendance, behavior, and course performance.
Half of all African-American male dropouts are concentrated in 660 high schools. “These 660 schools are typically big high schools that teach only poor kids of color. They are concentrated in 15 states. Many are in major cities, but others are in smaller, decaying industrial cities or in the South, especially in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.”
Once identified, they should get the extra attention, support, and help they need so that they will stay in school and keep up with their peers and eventually graduate.
“In 2008, my colleagues and I decided to focus on those struggling sixth and ninth graders. What if we reorganized entire schools with teams of teachers who shared a common group of students? What if we added more time for English and math and offered coaching for teachers and principals? What if we welcomed students to school, called them if they didn’t show up and helped with homework? What if we used an early warning system that identified struggling students based on their poor attendance, behavior and course performance and then worked to get each student back on track?”
Balfanz offers a list of recommended proposals, all but one of which makes sense. That one is “starting new schools,” as I know of no evidence that “starting new schools” solves any of the students’ problems but diverts money and energy into the process of starting new schools (in New York City, many of the new schools avoided the very students that Balfanz wants to help, in their pursuit of test scores). Everything else he proposes can be done in existing schools to make them work better for the students with the highest needs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think that many posters here would criticize the extra time spent on English and math as it would have to take time away from other things that are valued.
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Maybe Balfanz needs to wait until 6th grade but cracking good classroom teachers do not. Let us leave the “experts” to experimentation while democraticly-inspired public school teachers weigh in on how early they recognize a struggling student and how they would use available resources to address the multi-layered needs. Time to leave the cult of the expert behind as it has gotten us into hot water up to our eyeballs.
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Reblogged this on We Are More and commented:
What if we reorganized entire schools with teams of teachers who shared a common group of students? What if we added more time for English and math and offered coaching for teachers and principals? What if we welcomed students to school, called them if they didn’t show up and helped with homework? What if we used an early warning system that identified struggling students based on their poor attendance, behavior and course performance and then worked to get each student back on track?
No need for a new school; just a change of focus!
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The option you are suggesting is precisely why he is suggesting a dual approach – improve existing schools and give groups of teachers the chance to create new options. Not one or the other. Both.
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Robert Balfanz is viewing this through his ivory tower colored glasses. He has overlooked the simple and factual idea that “one size fits few”. We are trying to force every single child in America through the same small academic keyhole. The real answer is to provide alternate pathways for student success. A vocational track would work wonders for many.
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Article states this:
“In 2008, my colleagues and I decided to focus on those struggling sixth and ninth graders. What if we reorganized entire schools with teams of teachers who shared a common group of students? What if we added more time for English and math and offered coaching for teachers and principals?
What if we welcomed students to school, called them if they didn’t show up and helped with homework? What if we used an early warning system that identified struggling students based on their poor attendance, behavior and course performance and then worked to get each student back on track?”
my former school did this…they were called the team teacher approach…it didn’t work…they got rid of this practice
and they held mtgs since the teachers shared teh same kids in their classes…parents are the ke for these programs to work. nless they are on top of the kis at home the way teachers are on top of the kids in school, it won’t work…and it didn;t…It was a nice idea but very unsuccessful. No follow through on a consistent basis by parents or legal guardians of the students was one major factor of the failure.
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How about bringing back Vocational Education which many districts cut 20 years ago in favor of sending all children to college. It was a very bad idea then to cut the shop classes and it’s still a very bad idea. After all we need plumbers, carpenters, machinists, electricians who in today’s market wouldn’t have to worry about their job being taken overseas, and they’d be making excellent pay.
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Shush…you’re giving Wendy Kopp an idea. She will begin canvassing Harvard, Yale, Princeton, for “Plumb for America” and the like. That way, the brightest and the best can intern for 2 years, take the trade away from people who actually want those jobs, drive down the salaries and quality of work performed, and ruin those vocations. Kaaaa-ching. She will make a nice profit from all the corporate connections she has, and further disenfranchise the middle class job economy. Win-win.
Manicures for America
Hairstyles for America
‘Lectricians R America
Garbage Haulers for USA
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Yes, part of the answer is to have different options available, including strong vocational ed programs. These will help some youngsters for whom the traditional academic approach does not work well.
We need to be careful not to go back to the “bad old days” when some youngsters from low income families and students of color were pushed toward these programs. But an option like this is a good one.
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Reform isn’t about curing drop out rates or getting kids into college….its about creating the future’s walmart worker. Pretty much everything about reform is lip service to creating better education, but in practice, it is destroying education. Common Core is dumbed down, so kids can go straight to work in a low-paying job, or to community college for remedial math and english. Closing schools, and opening several locations that serve a few grades, exactly what the charterizers do (K-2, with more grades to be added later) or a high school, or whatever, with principals for a few grades in each school, not a principal for the entire school (ka-ching), disenfranchising neighborhoods, making parents take their kids across town just to get to school, detentions, rigor/silence, teaching to the test, chronic testing, bubble filling….
None of anything that the reformers do creates better educated kids; it ruins them, it tortures them, it humiliates them, it harms them.
Why would the 1% want to discourage dropping out of school?
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Donna, why would they care? Good question. The 1% don’t care about the person, but they do care about their profits, and if too many don’t graduate then their work force won’t be as skilled as they would have them be.
By the way, I don’t think this new CC curriculum was created to dumb down the kids because what they’ve done is to accelerate it so that only the very top students have the drive and determination to understand the new math formulas they’ve created, no I think it’s meant to divide the haves from the havenots by their intelligences.
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I think it is more likely the parents that will have trouble with changes in the math curriculum than the students. Back in the day I remember trying to explain base 2 arithmetic to a neighborhood parent. It was difficult for her to get the concept.
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We can identify kids at 4 yrs old who don’t pass our self-developed kindergarten assessment instrument after their parents complete our First Teachers @ Home preschool preparation program. These kids, unlike the 82.3% of the 4 year olds who pass the assessment, typically fail kindergarten, 1st. 2nd and 3rd grades. Research underscores the trajectory that these children follow- an inevitable pattern that directly leads to dropping out in high school.
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“These kids, unlike the 82.3% of the 4 year olds who pass the assessment, typically fail kindergarten, 1st. 2nd and 3rd grades.”
And that, folks, shows just how embedded in our culture the STUPIDITY of “grading, sorting and separating” students through labelling them. How the hell can a kindergartener “fail” kindergarten. Let’s make sure they know that they are failures, hell, they’ll eventually get three squares a day by being a “failure”.
If grading schools A-F (or any other schema/words) is bad for schools just think how worse it is for the children labelled as “FAILURES”. “You’re a fxxking failure you idiot” is what we are telling these innocent children. Now that, folks, is truly UNETHICAL AND IMMORAL.
And to base that label on “the assessment”, how completely and UTTERLY ILLOGICAL, INVALID AND INSANE is that considering those standardized assessments are themselves completely invalid as shown by Wilson.
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To understand why educational standards and standardized testing are a COMPLETE EDUCATIONAL ATROCITY and are UNETHICAL MALPRACTICES see Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted take down of those malpractices in his 1997 study “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
“Half of all African-American male dropouts are concentrated in 660 high schools.” But there are 24,544 public secondary schools in the United States. Those drop out factories mentioned in this post represent 2.68% of the total number of secondary public schools. And because of that small number, the fake education reformers want to do away with public education across the board and replace them with opaque, private sector corporate profit driven charter schools that throw out the same kids who end up dropping out of the public schools.
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“others are in smaller, decaying industrial cities or in the South, especially in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.”
The common denominator is the total economic destruction of these cities by predatory business practices & poor govt policies.
Schools are a reflection of society.
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I am curious about the distinction you implicitly draw between predatory business practices and non-predatory ones. How do you differentiate the two?
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Ignore this fool
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This is an important question.
Perhaps you live in Rochester, New York, a city the clearly suffered from the demise of Kodak. I will confess to you now that I had a tiny part in Rochester’s troubles because I switched from using film to digital photography. I have also never purchased a car made in Michigan, so I suppose I also contributed to the decline of Detroit.
How many of us have not contributed to the decline of a city’s fortune?
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I applaud your comment.
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…and I was replying to NY teacher. Not the fool.
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“Half of all African-American male dropouts are concentrated in 660 high schools.” But there are 24,544 public secondary schools in the United States. Those drop out factories mentioned in this post represent 2.68% of the total number of secondary public schools. And because of that small number, the fake education reformers want to do away with public education across the board and replace them with opaque, private-sector, corporate, profit-driven charter schools that throw out the same kids who end up dropping out of the public schools.
As you might see, there are no profits to be made from these children so they will be dumped into the pipeline to prison—-for profit, private sector prisons, in fact. The fake education reformers will profit off the tax payer one way or another.
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LL
Please stop making so much sense, you will confuse any reformer or CCSS advocate that has one neuron of integrity in them.
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LOL
Do you really think they have any trace of integrity in them? I don’t think they were born with it in them. Recent brain research suggests that psychopaths are born that way and whatever influences integrity and empathy is missing.
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Don’t worry Lloyd, you probably wont confuse any of them.
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Correct, it’s all about the money.
-the problem is Capitalism-
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I have thought for years that we can’t have pure socialism and we can’t have pure capitalism—both fail on their own. There must be a balance between the two, and that’s why Social Security and programs like Medicare must be fixed and survive.
Either system in isolation will fail and lead to injustice for some. And labor unions are one of the few voices that fights for socialist programs such as Social Security, vested retirement, and national medical care for workers—-something successful capitalist oligarchs hate because spreading some of that money around to benefit the people cuts into their profits and the growth of their vast wealth and power.
What’s a tragedy is that so many working Americans who are not wealthy support people like Bill Gates, the Waltons and the Koch brothers, which is the same as shooting themselves in the back more than once everytiem they complain about SS, retirement plans and programs like Medicare.
Billionaires don’t need socialist programs like SS or medicare, but the other 99% of the population does.
SS and Medicare by themsevles, do not equal a social political system or government.
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Money is hypnotic.
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Too much money begets power and power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore, the more money one has—for instance Bill Gates—the more corrupt one may become until they start to think they can do no wrong as if he was a god.
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Billy the Gates isn’t a GOD?????
Damn, you may make me more of a non-believing free thinker with that thought.
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Concerned about dropouts? I have some suggestions.
How about health care?
For example:
Lots of my struggling students ( males AND females, BTW), can’t see, and haven’t been able to see for years. But the family has no means to provide glasses or update prescriptions. Hard to do well in school when you cannot read the text or see the board no matter how close to the front. Gee, wonder why these kids are having a hard time in school, right.?
Or decent jobs and resources for their parents and families?
Case study 1:
Very bright student missed over a month of school, almost didn’t graduate. Why? Well, surprise, it wasn’t the lazy teachers. Seems this kid’s mom got sick/ hurt and couldn’t go to work. The boss of the cleaning service she worked for said he would fire her if someone didn’t pick up her shifts. Guess who? Yep, the oldest child stepped up to keep a roof over his family.
Case study 2:
Struggling ESOL student ( moved here at 13, having difficulty learning English fast enough to keep up with all the rigorous academics) began missing about every other day of school. Reason? Mom’s job. Seems oldest kid was needed to watch/ baby sit younger siblings. Kid did end up dropping out. Definitely the fault of the school, right? If only someone had called home more or mentored the student.
I could go on and on. These stories are not unique, isolated, uncommon situations.
They represent the real, everyday experience of our students and their families.
I am not sure phoning home, church mentors, and teams of teachers can solve these problems. ( by the way, we already do many of the things mentioned in the article).
Perhaps if anyone really cared about at risk students, society would step up and offer help beyond excessive testing and increased rigor.
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We created a similar program for potential dropouts called SARP ( Student At Risk Program ) at an 1800 student body Title 1 middle school in Miami. It was so successful in reducing suspensions that Harvard profiled us in a study. I write about it in my book, I’m in the Principal’s Seat, Now What? The Story of a Turnaround Principal.
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That was pre-NCLB/CCSS. Times have changed. Reducing suspensions is not the same as increasing achievement. As a consultant with 40 years of public school experience you should recognize this.
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It appears to me that most of his proposals have a simple element–treat kids in a caring, loving manner. Talking to, coaching and giving a helping hand are all common sense approaches. Basically, this is how middle class parents help their struggling children. All we have to do is give high need students what we give our own kids.
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Yes, but it must start when they’re in the womb, from pre-natal nutrition on, 24/7, 365. By the end of 8th grade a student has spent 5% of their life in front of a teacher.
For the one calendar year I have with my 8th grade students, they spend about 1% of their year in front of me, assuming their attendance is perfect. That means, as secondary teachers, we get a grand total of 100 hours of face time to work our wonders. I have one hundred students, so each one gets me for only one hour per school year as far is individual attention goes.
At least on paper.
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Just saw your comment. Of course, I agree with you. I will go even further. In the mid 90s, I was an Educational Evaluator and helped my social worker colleague with a doctoral thesis. It was on whether a high level of support services would lead to academic achievement of at-risk students in a high needs elementary environment (if we use modern jargon). For four months, I and four other teachers provided two on one tutoring before school three days a week and the social worker and psychologist provided family and student counseling. We developed a training course that taught parents to understand the curriculum and supervise homework. The course was given by us at times convenient for the parents–weekends, when the kids were picked up, evenings, etc. We worked with about 20 at-risk students who were failing but not yet referred for special education services. Guess what!!! 18 began to make academic progress. I administered pre and post academic tests. The pretests told me what they needed to learn and the post told me whether there was mastery. I remember the principal being so pleased, but we could not continue because it was a big commitment volunteering to help a colleague for those four months. I remember that he tried to get a grant and extra per-session money to continue it, but he got nothing. There were no hedge-fund astroturf organizations (or what used to be called nonprofits) anywhere who would give us a cent even though we had statistical proof of efficacy.
I would bet if I tried to recreate that program right now using my colleagues doctoral thesis as the blueprint not one of the fake reform organizations would fund it. Why would they fund a public school program that works when obviously they have a different agenda–the destruction of public education.
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Good going. You’re right on target. May I suggest that, instead of mentoring after school or as a separate entity, in 1995 we build that concept into the every day school activities. Check out our reading program in my upcoming book tentatively titled Brainstorming Common Core.
Kids separated into groups with those having the most need,, in class sizes of 3 or 4. and always a pre and post test, given one on one to assure accuracy.
Yes, do it now, the time is right
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Nice try but your suggestions are only a piece of the puzzle. Kids will never be at the same place at the same time because they don’t have the same brains. Yes, give the support you suggest, but, if they move through the system slower, wait for them without failing them into oblivion. A systemic change will be defined in my upcoming book, Brainstorming the Common Core: Salvaging the Fiasco of Reform. Look for it in a few months
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There’s more than just different brains involved. Children also don’t have the same parents/guardians, the same environment to grow up in, the same diet, the same health, etc.
For instance, a child with asthma has more challenges to learn than a child who doesn’t have asthma. And that’s only one example of many.
One kid comes to class after a sixty ounce Coke for lunch and another child ate a healthy, nutritious brain food lunch their mother packed for them at home.
Who do you think will be in a better place to learn?
Or one kid slept ten hours after doing their homework and reading for an hour for entrainment—because the parents control the TV—before sleep, versus the average American child who watches several hours of TV a day, plays video games for an hour or more, sent a dozen text messages and got to bed by 2:00 AM with five hours or less sleep. Then they got up and went to school without breakfast but did grab a bag of fries and a Coke at the local McDonald’s. And this describes the average American child.
Which parent will have more impact.
The parent who talks to their child thirty minutes or more daily or the average American parent who talks to their child less than five minutes a week?
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What helped us reduce our dropout rate were the offerings we had for electives in band and art. So many of our students did not meet with academic success but could connect through their talents…and…often they came to realize that they could fit in academically too.
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Great examples of why it’s important to offer multiple pathways to success.
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More English or more Math is not what the kids need. They need to have decent lives, food, shelter and gas and electricity. There used to be some generosity with food but no more, but shelter, gas and electricity is just as important. People need work and feel they are valued, not put into prison. Just giving kids more English and Math sounds like a death knell to me. Ask the kids what they want and give them room to really say it, and they will not answer more English and Math.
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