by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader

In a recent post, Mel Riddile highlighted several of the shortcomings associated with the latest method for determining graduation rates mandated by the U.S. Department of Education.  While the goal of this policy is worthy—standardizing the calculations throughout the nation—the resulting process is flawed, unfair and ultimately inaccurate.  The two key problems are an arbitrary time frame and an unrealistic as well as potentially punitive accounting for transfer students. 

Simple does not equal accurate

The ultimate goal of a graduation rate should be to measure a school’s effectiveness in producing successful students.  One of the reasons why the accuracy of this statistic has been so elusive is that it depends on so many variables.   In attempting to simplify the process, the Department of Education has built a method of measurement that will make for easy computations but misleading results.  What this overhaul ignores is that schools with high rates of poverty, mobility and ELL populations will be evaluated on information that does not truly reflect the academic performance occurring in their building. Dr. Riddile explained the problems with this new system from the perspective of a principal.  Here are three stories to illustrate the view from inside the classroom.

Easy come, easy go

In schools with high mobility the percentage of students who spend their entire academic careers at the same location can be surprisingly small.  My former school had an annual mobility rate of about 30% meaning that approximately one of every three students left during a typical year.  But during that time the size of the student body was extremely stable.   With remarkable consistency virtually every individual who moved to a new district or returned to their home country would be offset by someone coming in the opposite direction.  I once taught an introductory ELL course, Individual Math 1, which began the year with 24 students and finished with the same number.  Only one-half of those students were enrolled for the entire course.  This level of movement is not a reflection of the quality of education being provided; rather, it reveals the nature of the student body.  Consequently, under the new Department of Education guidelines while the actual instruction in that classroom may have been excellent, the dropout rate of these ninth-graders bordered on 50%.   Clearly labeling unverified transfer students as dropouts places an unfair burden on such schools.   The alternative, precise tracking of all of these individuals as mandated by this plan, would be far too costly in terms of time and energy. 

A tale of two graduates

Maria was in my Algebra 1 class.  She was smart, hardworking, reliable and the mother of a one-year old son.  Her boyfriend (soon to be her husband) and the baby lived with her family while she completed high school.  During her freshman year she made a detour to give birth but when she returned the next year there was no request for special treatment.  She passed my class and all of her other classes.   After five years at the school marched across the stage at graduation.  When I last heard from her she was an assistant manager at a bank.  While the data may label her as a drop-out, I can promise you she was not.

Michelle, my second example, was a quiet and petite member of my Pre-calculus class.   A refugee from Viet Nam she did not look like a 22-year-old.   But the path to her senior year of high school was very different than most.  What should have been her middle school years were spent either on a boat or in a prisoner of war camp.  When she finally arrived in this country she had the life experiences of an adult and the education of a child.  As a 17-year-old “freshman” she had to overcome language and emotional difficulties few others could even imagine.  Despite these immense challenges she succeeded in a college preparatory curriculum to earn a diploma as she approached her 23^rd birthday.  Though her story was far from traditional it deserved positive recognition by any legitimate measure.

Numbers cannot measure everything

As a mathematician, I would love to be able to state that every human endeavor can be measured quantitatively.  Unfortunately such precision is not always possible.  Even baseball, the most data driven sport on the planet, cannot evaluate simply on numbers. Every pitch, every swing of the bat, every spit is recorded, calculated and documented.  But despite this wealth of statistical data there are players in baseball who need to be seen to be appreciated.  There are no precise metrics to measure breaking up a double play, diving to catch balls, sprinting on every play or simply being unselfish. 

Formulating a simple yet accurate device for determining high school graduation rates is equally difficult.  What many of the educational policy makers may not understand is that the diversity of a student body is not just about ethnicity, religion or socioeconomic status.  It also includes both the time required to graduate and the stability of their residency.  This most recent attempt by the Department Education is clearly not the answer. 

Posted by Mel Riddile at 11:25 AM | Permalink

I have been warning colleagues for months that bad news about graduation rates was on the way. Well, that day has arrived. According to a new report, "states are bracing for plummeting high school graduation rates as districts nationwide dump flawed measurement formulas that often undercounted dropouts and produced inflated results."

New Formula

The drop in the reported graduation rates is the result of the adoption of a new formula mandated by the U.S. Department of Education, which is similar to one developed by the National Governor's Association: the number of graduates in a given year, divided by the number of students who enrolled four years earlier.

Also, schools must document transfer students or they'll artificially deflate the graduation rate. In the past, many schools weren't required to document that transfers showed up somewhere else.

Of course, the offenders must be punished! Schools that consistently miss targeted graduation measures must face sanctions.

Declining Rates: "Modest to Massive"

Some states will see their rates drop by as much as 20 percentage points.

- Michigan had a nearly 10-percentage point fall when they made the switch in 2007.

- Florida's graduation rate "remained stable," at 79 percent, when it adopted the new graduation rate in the 2009-10 school year. "It would have been nearly two points higher if it had continued under the old calculation."

- Kansas expects the graduation rate to drop from 89 percent to 80 percent, with "one district in the state anticipating a 20-point drop."

- Georgia said its overall rate—now at 80 percent—could drop about 15 percentage points.

- Virginia's graduation rate dropped from 90 percent to 81 when the new formula was adopted in 2008.

According to the report, "experts hope the changes will draw attention to the dropout issue and lead to resources being focused on the problem."

Not for accountability purposes

While I fully support a uniform method for calculating graduation rates, researchers have warned policy makers not to use graduation rates for accountability purposes. One researcher told a group, of which I was a part, that 'if a school had more than a three percent mobility rate, the accuracy of the graduation rate could vary by as much a four to ten percentage points.' Of course, in their never-ending search for simple solutions to complex problems, the so-called experts are again ignoring the researchers.

Schools are not FedEx

One expert has publicly stated "if FedEx can track a package, we can track students." What he failed to account for is that every FedEx package has a bar code, but there is no national student identifying number. Therefore, if a student moves across the river into another state or returns to his or her country of birth, the school has no way of tracking that student if the student fails to report their previous school. Therefore, that student is a dropout.

A 2011 National Academies report titled High School Dropout, Graduation, and Completion Rates: Better Data, Better Measures, Better Decisions specifically states, “Our review also suggests that cohort rates based on aggregate data are not sufficiently accurate for research, policy, or accountability decisions.”

The rich get richer

What no one will admit is that the poorest schools with the highest student mobility rates will be unduly penalized by the new formula for calculating graduation rates. These schools, who already have the decked stacked against them, will report graduation rates that are actually worse than their actual performance.

The poor get poorer!

Teachers and principals will be fired. Schools will be closed on the basis of a flawed system for calculating graduation rates.

Five or Six Years, Not Four

If a student takes longer than four years to graduate, that student is counted as a dropout. ELL and special education students often take more than four years to graduate. Under this calculation, expect their graduation rates to plummet.

Colleges and universities, who select their students, use a six-year rate. High schools, who cannot select their students, are forced to use a four-year rate. This makes absolutely no sense.

A Complex Problem

As the National Academies report indicates, calculating a high school's graduation rate is a much more complex process than most policy makers comprehend or will take the time to understand. Graduation rate should be one of many metrics used to evaluate a school, but it is only one measure.

The report recommends the use of a more sophisticated combination of calculations in order to arrive at a more accurate graduation rate. Simplistic formulas will not solve complex problems.

This issue is important enough that we take the time to read the report before jumping to erroneous conclusions about high school graduation and graduation rates.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 09:46 AM | Permalink

Background: Nationally, two-thirds of students are not reading on grade level by the fourth grade, the earliest year of testing in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). That proportion rises to four-fifths for low-income children, according to NAEP results released last year.

A recently released national study indicates that students who are not proficient readers in third grade are significantly more likely to drop out. "Students who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma than proficient readers."

It's Poverty Not Stupid (3-6-8) "Poverty compounds the problem."

Students who have lived in poverty are three times more likely to drop out or fail to graduate on time than their more affluent peers;

• If they read poorly, too, the rate is six times greater than that for all proficient readers.
• For black and Latino students, the combined effect of poverty and poor third grade reading skills makes the rate eight times greater.
• Poverty troubles even the best readers: Proficient third graders who have lived in poverty graduate at about the same rate as subpar readers who have never been poor.

“We will never close the achievement gap, we will never solve our dropout crisis, we will never break the cycle of poverty that afflicts so many children if we don’t make sure that all our students learn to read,” said Ralph Smith, executive vice president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Specifically, the study found:

• One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers.
• The rates are highest for the low, below-basic readers: 23 percent of these children drop out or fail to finish high school on time, compared to 9 percent of children with basic reading skills and 4 percent of proficient readers.
• The below-basic readers account for a third of the sample but three-fifths of the students who do not graduate.
• Overall, 22 percent of children who have lived in poverty do not graduate from high school, compared to 6 percent of those who have never been poor. This rises to 32 percent for students spending more than half of their lives in poverty.
• For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently in third grade, the proportion of those who don’t finish school rose to 26 percent.  The rate was highest for poor black and Hispanic students, at 31 and 33 percent respectively. Even so the majority of students who fail to graduate are white.
• Even among poor children who were proficient readers in third grade, 11 percent still didn’t finish high school. That compares to 9 percent of subpar third graders who were never poor.
• Among children who never lived in poverty, all but 2 percent of the best third-grade readers graduated from high school on time.

The study concluded that improvements are needed in the following areas:

1. improving the schools where these children are learning to read
2. helping the families weighed down by poverty
3. better federal, state and local policy to improve the lot of both schools and families
4. aligning quality early education programs with the curriculum and standards in the primary grades
5. paying better attention to health and developmental needs of young children
6. providing work training and other programs that will help lift families out of poverty.

Essential Question

Can high schools or middle schools afford to wait until students arrive at their doors with reading problems?

• The development of math and literacy skills is a PK-12 issue, not an elementary issue, not a middle school issue, and certainly not a high school issue.
• Vertical articulation between all levels is one key to improving literacy skills.
• Curriculum alignment is another key.
• Cross-content literacy instruction (Common Core ELA Standards) and whole-school literacy initiatives are another key.
• Keep in mind that, even if under-resourced students are proficient by third grade, they must have direct, explicit literacy (reading, writing, thinking, discussing) instruction every year thereafter or they will not progress.
• Literacy skills predict future math performance, which, in turn, predicts future college completion.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 10:11 AM | Permalink

This week I am blogging from the NASSP Conference in San Francisco.

I used to say, "show me the data." However, it has gotten to the point that I no longer need to look at a school's data to know that a school is thriving or struggling. I can simply listen to what the staff of the school talks about. High-performing schools talk about students and how they are meeting their needs. Struggling schools talk about adult wants and adult needs.

Student-Focused

After attending three School Showcase presentations this morning it became crystal clear to me that schools serving large numbers under-resourced students must have a student-focused obsession, and that obsession must relate to the specific needs of the population that the school serves.

The three schools all served under-resourced students. However, the three high schools varied in size, had very different demographics, and were located in states with very different economics and education policies. The context in which these schools operated was about as different as they could possibly be.

Although they were very different in appearance, the three schools had a lot in common. They each had a laser-like focus on student success that bordered on an obsession. In fact, these three schools were so obsessed with student success that they were willing to overcome any obstacle that got in their way.

Literacy: Brockton High School (MA) is a large (4,350) urban high school that has focused on raising the literacy--reading, writing, thinking, discussing--levels of ALL students, particularly its large ELL population. Principal, Susan Szachowicz, and a "handful of fellow teachers" organized a school wide campaign that brought reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym. According to a New York Times article, Brockton's literacy-for-all success has defied the "small is better orthodoxy" proving that any school can beat the odds and raise student performance.

Attendance: The audience turned to each other with looks of disbelief when the staff of Arroyo High School (CA) posted their three-year attendance figures. Arroyo's average daily attendance was well over 96%. For a large, high-poverty, high minority, urban high school, 96% is phenomenal. However, I could see the enthusiasm abate as the staff spent about twenty minutes describing all the initiatives the school used to improve attendance. As I have emphasized over and over again, improving student attendance is all about hard work and will power, and the Arroyo staff have plenty of both. Arroyo's success formula is simple. Get the students to attend school every day and make sure that the students succeed.

Course Failure: The presentation began with a simple but very effective slide that pointed out that, over a three-year period, Barberton (OH) High School had reduced course failures from over 2,500 to 350. The staff at Barberton must have read Bob Balfanz's dropout research that points out that course failure is one of the best indicators of dropping out of school. Admittedly, a school could reduce failures by simply lowering standards. This was not the case at Barberton, where the focus was clear and no obstacle too big to overcome. The staff used small learning communities, flexible scheduling, a unique master schedule, student-led conferences, and an advisory program among other strategies to significantly improve student performance.

The Bottom Line

These three schools demonstrate that there are no quick fixes. Even though these schools shared a student-focused obsession it took years of hard work, dedication, determination, and sheer will power to realize success. However, their obvious pride and sense of accomplishment make it obvious that the effort was all worth it.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 03:30 PM | Permalink

According to a report by Catherine Gewertz of Education Week, a study released today by the Center on Education Policy, indicates that testing at the high school level will increase.

• More states are using assessments as barriers to graduation and requiring other exams that are not linked to graduation. Twenty-eight states now have such requirements, up from 26 in the 2009 report.
• Three quarters of the nation’s students now attend schools in states that give exit exams.
• Twenty-three states currently give end-of-course tests. Only seven use them as exit exams, but another 10 plan to begin doing so.
• States increasingly are requiring students to take a college-entrance exam—the ACT or SAT—or a workplace-readiness test such as WorkKeys.
• More states also are requiring or considering some form of portfolio assessment.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 05:33 AM | Permalink

Just before I went on stage to deliver a keynote speech on dropout prevention before over a thousand people, my host grabbed my arm and said, "See that large man in the front row? He controls the finances in the state legislature and he is very interested in what you have to say." I looked at him and said, "Thanks for not putting any pressure on me."

I began my speech by saying "Our school operated on a simple premise. Treat other peoples' children the way that you would want your own child treated. If every school believed that, we wouldn't be here today talking about dropout prevention." At that, the man in the front row stood up and began to applaud. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

I always believed that many of our challenges in education could be corrected if we would simply treat other peoples' children as though they were our own. I would want my child in a small classroom with an excellent teacher. I would want my child to receive personal attention from the teacher. I would want my child to receive additional assistance should she fall behind. I would want my child to have an individual learning plan customized to her unique talents and interests. Our school accomplished many things for many students because we walked the talk.

Unfortunately, too many influential people refuse to walk their talk. They are locked into a do as I say not as I do mode. They talk about public education and the benefits of diversity and send their own children to elite private schools. They tell us that large class sizes and teacher pay don't impact student performance. According to Bruce Baker in School Finance 101 "private independent schools in particular, systematically outspend public schools in the same labor market by about 2/1" and their main point of differentiation is, you guessed it, small class sizes. In other words, small classes and high teacher pay for my child, large classes and low teacher pay for your child.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 09:25 AM | Permalink

In a recent post, The Teacher Leader pointed out “Successful teaching cannot begin until students are regularly attending class." Student attendance is not something any school leader wants to talk about, but it is a topic that we must address. Because time-on-task and direct, explicit instruction correlate highly with achievement, the first responsibility of every instructional leader is to ensure that our students actually show up every day.

Upon arriving at my new school, I proceeded to ask our teachers a simple question. What do we need to do in order to improve? I will always remember what our Science Department Chair, Sherry Singer, said to me. “Mel, our students don’t come to school, and, when they do, they can’t read.”

It was from that simple question and Sherry’s straightforward response that our decade-long school journey began. We believed that turning around our school hinged on attendance and strong literacy skills, it was on those two focal points, attendance and literacy, that we formed our “R-A-G-S to riches” school improvement plan—Reading plus Attendance will result in better Grades and a Safe school.

This month's issue of Education Next featured an article entitled Truants: The Challenges of Keeping Kids in School. The article made a number of salient points about attendance and truancy:

• There is a direct line from truancy to dropping out of school, juvenile crime, gang membership, drug use, teen pregnancy, poor health, receiving public assistance, and a whole host of negative behaviors.
• Schools are losing huge amounts of state funding due to poor student attendance.
• California - Reports that 24% of its 6.2 million students are considered truants.
• Wisconsin - 15.4% of students are truants. 62 percent of African American students were identified as truant.
• New York City reports that 24% of the high school students are truants.
• Washington, D.C. has a 20% truancy rate in which students were absent for 15 days or more without an excuse. D.C. spent $11 million on no-shows.
• Los Angeles posts a 16% truancy rate, which translates into a loss of 130,000 student days of state funding.
• Gender - Truancy is divided equally between boys and girls.
• Family - 50% live in single-parent households.
• Poverty - One-third live in poverty.
• Truancy laws are generally target parents and enforcement is "typically lax."
• Context Affects Attendance - A lack of food, unemployment, a lack of parental education, and parents in poor health all negatively impact attendance.

School staffers, social workers, prosecutors, and police officers repeatedly asserted that "Truancy is never the problem, it is the symptom."

Taking Action to Improve Attendance

• Students who miss school miss out.
• Improving attendance is hard work. It is more about will and determination than it is about technique. We must do everything in our power to encourage students to attend school. Our attendance rate started at a low 89% and, within two years, we improved to 96%. Going from 19 days of absence per student to 7.5 days per student added over two weeks of school of instrution without costing us a dime.
• Attendance is a prime early warning indicator of dropping out. "Information about absences may be the most practical indicator for identifying students in need of early interventions (Allensworth & Easton, 2007)."
• Students with a 10% or more absence rate have less than a 20% chance of graduating. Keep an updated list of students with attendance problems, set up parent conferences and, most importantly, insist that parents attend.
• Establish interventions for rising 9th graders. Don't wait for the problem to emerge. It will be too late.
• Students will attend school when they feel wanted. Make "wake-up" calls. Use technology to call the homes of students who are habitually late to school.
• Students will attend if they feel invited. In fact, the number one reason dropouts cite for leaving school is that no one cared if they were there. Let your students know that you want them in school every day.
• Students will attend school when they believe that they can succeed and that the staff is committed to their success. Set up a system of tiered interventions that ensure that students are never allowed to fall behind. Your students should say, "In this school it is hard to fail. The teachers won't let you fail. They never give up on you."

Posted by Mel Riddile at 03:23 PM | Permalink

According to a recent report, the U.S. Department of Education is relying on a revitalized high school graduation initiative, and "betting nearly $50 million that it can help states and school districts find better ways to hang onto students who might drop out and bring back those who have disappeared without diplomas."

Key elements of the dropout prevention initiatives include:

• monitoring of student attendance
• monitoring student behavior
• building “early warning systems” that alert middle level and high schools to the need for early intervention.
• targeting students in need instead of demographic targeting
• emphasis on early intervention at the middle level
• addressing social-emotional needs of students
• bringing back recent dropouts
• identifying social service partners in the community

Early Warning Signs

• 10% or greater absenteeism
• failing a core course the previous year
• a grade-point average below 2.0
• one or more suspensions
• history of discipline problems
• reading in the bottom quartile
• retention at any grade level

Bottom Line

"A marginal middle school student will fail in high school."

School leaders don't have to wait for a federal grant. We know the warning signs and we have the data already available to us. Upon learning the warning signs, one principal immediately identified over 60 high-risk students who would be entering the ninth grade this year. Instead of waiting for those students to re-emerge later in the school year, the principal developed a plan to meet with those students on the first day of school and to provide continuous contact and support for them from day one.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 11:07 AM | Permalink

Ask any educational reformer for a list of the most critical problems in our schools today and the topic of student attendance will inevitably be found near the top.  The logic is simple—if you are not there, you are not going to learn.  But based on a recent Education Week article by Hedy Chang the solutions to this long-term problem may be far more complicated than many would expect.  Ms. Chang presents five significant myths about student attendance that should give everyone in education pause.   Here are the misconceptions that she believes are inhibiting some real solutions to the problem.

Students don’t start missing a lot of school until middle or high school.

National research has determined that 10% of all kindergarten and first-graders miss at least a month of school each year.  In some places, such as New York City, the number of students is twice as high.  Obviously the vast majority of these absences are excused—children at this age are unlikely to be staying home without some parental supervision.  According to Ms. Chang the ramifications are potentially immense:  “…the bad attendance habits that lead to skipping school can become entrenched in the early years.”

Absences in the early grades don’t really affect academics.

Not surprisingly studies show that chronically absent kindergarten students do not perform as well in the first grade as those who were consistently present.  It is not unusual to have these deficiencies continue throughout elementary school.  Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments was found in Chicago where the attendance of ninth-graders proved to be a better predictor of drop outs than eighth-grade test scores.

Most schools already know how many students are chronically absent.

Ms. Chang laments that most school data concerning absences only revolve around the total school attendance patterns and “unexcused” absences.  Consequently many individuals who are missing large portions of class time remain under the educational radar.  As she points out “an elementary school of 400 students can have 95 percent of its students showing up every day and yet still have 60 children missing 18 days—or 10 percent of the school year.”

There’s not much that schools can do to improve attendance; it’s up to the parents.

While certainly the traditional path of parental involvement and truant officers needs to be taken, there are often unique concerns that an individual school can incorporate into their programs.  Ms. Chang relates that many causes of chronic absenteeism can be mitigated.  She speaks of Muslim students missing classes during Ramadan for fear of sitting in the cafeteria during these days of fasting.  Other schools had problems resulting from parents who were shift workers and were not awake when their children should have been leaving for school.  Another group that missed too many days was those in homeless shelters.  In each of these cases the affected schools found solutions. One brought in a Muslim counselor and a separate room for these students during the lunch period.  For parents who slept during the day, a school opened the building early to allow parents to drop off their children after work and before going to bed.  

The Federal government has no role in reducing chronic absenteeism.

Test scores may be important but one of the major reasons for poor test scores is bad attendance.  Ms. Chang believes that the federal government should be requiring statistics on chronic absenteeism as well as truancy and test scores.  School improvement can be measured by improved attendance.

The Bottom Line

Successful teaching cannot begin until students are regularly attending class.  Every day that is missed is a lost opportunity regardless of whether the absence is excused or not.  Consequently strategies need to be created to maximize student presence. At my former school the administrative team recognized the importance of this problem and employed a number of techniques to reduce “excused” absences.  When many Muslim students were leaving early on Fridays for prayer, the principal met with officials from the mosque and arranged for a parent volunteer to come to the building during lunch to hold the sessions in the school.  For students who were chronically absent, an automated callout system was used to make 6:00 a.m. wake-up calls to these specific homes.  But as Ms. Chang has written, too many times such innovations are being implemented too late in the process.  These kinds of interventions need to occur at the very beginning of a student’s education.

For every elementary school the overriding need is to acknowledge that all absences -excused or unexcused - are detrimental. They have both short- and long-term negative consequences.  A culture establishing excellent attendance must be created in the earliest grades.  To that end, careful and consistent attention must be given to the analysis of the attendance record of each individual student not just school-wide data.  Every reason given for missing school should be examined and methods devised to prevent them from becoming chronic. If such an approach is started in the primary years, the continuation of such policies at the high school level will become far more effective.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 02:05 PM | Permalink

by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader

As the 2010 political season heats up, the nation’s unemployment rate has become a key issue.    The discussion typically revolves around how the future of elected officials will be ultimately determined by the public’s assessment of the jobs situation in the country.  Arguments abound as to the causes.  Some say that the crisis is the result of the downturn in the economy, while others blame poorly implemented government interventions.  Outsourcing and greed are also worked into the conversation.  I would like to offer a contrarian view.  The United States does not have an unemployment problem.  The United States has an education problem.

Some stunning numbers

Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data illuminate some of the root causes of the current dilemma.  The overall jobless rate of 9.5% does not reveal the true story – at least not in its entirety.  Individuals without a high school diploma are more than three times as likely (13.8%) to be unemployed as people who have a college degree (4.5%). And having a high school diploma provides scant assistance (10.1%).   The economy is not merely shedding jobs; it is sending a clear message as to the economic future of our least educated. 

Far worse than it looks

While those numbers may not be surprising for some people, there are other facts that are legitimate reason for alarm.  By virtually every measure the United States is quickly becoming a world leader in high school dropouts.  A  news report on CBS related that our country which once boasted the highest graduation rate in the world now ranks 18th among industrialized nations.  If the downward trajectory continues the results would be calamitous.  This country may soon be facing an economic decline, which has little to do with derivatives and everything to do with diplomas.

Connecting the dots

The most terrifying aspect of all of these numbers is the fact that few people are really talking about them.  You cannot walk ten feet in this country without a discussion breaking out about the Mosque at ground zero, the oil spill in the Gulf or the future of Bret Favre.  And although there is also conversation about job loss, it fails to address the root cause.  If the unemployment numbers drop from 9.5% to say 8.5% the pundits will declare victory and move on to the next problem.   Even though the numbers that really matter are a high school dropout rate of more than 30% and rising, and a world rank of 18th and falling.

The world of 2010 has become a much less forgiving place for those individuals who have not completed high school.  If history is any guide, the general economy will eventually recover and the country will move on to yet another political crisis.  But the truth is until we, as a nation, find a way to ensure a good education for every citizen, the tragedy of unemployable individuals will never disappear. 

Posted by Mel Riddile at 05:36 AM | Permalink

High schools make the “dropout factory” list when then they have a 60% or lower cohort graduation rate over four years. Now, colleges and universities are under the microscope, and based on Jay Mathews report on a Washington Monthly article, they should be. While encouraging my students to take a rigorous course of study in high school, I have warned them for years that “universities are more than happy to take your money and send you home,” but never in my wildest dreams did I believe that a college could have a six-year, not four-year, graduation rate of 4.98%.

You have to see it to believe it. So, here is a listing of the bottom ten:

1. Southern University at New Orleans, La. 4.98 percent
2. Allen University, S.C. 6.09
3. Martin University, Ind. 6.67
4. Bellevue University, Neb. 6.99
5. Calumet College of Saint Joseph, Ind. 7.14
6. Baker College of Auburn Hills, Mich. 7.14
7. Visible School--Music and Worships Arts College, Ind. 7.50
8. University of the District of Columbia, D.C. 7.94
9. Saint Augustine's College, N.C. 8.24
10. Nyack College, N.Y. 7.9

My reaction is simple. You can’t make this up!

Share this with your counselors and encourage them to read the article. It is an eye opener.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 05:25 PM | Permalink

Sarah Garland wonders out loud why a disproportionate number of high schools are involved in the turnaround grant program. She is asking the right questions, but the answers she received don’t tell the whole story. These grants may, in fact, be a case of too little too late. I thought that it might help to offer a high school principal’s perspective.

Every Grade

High schools should not be singled out for any special treatment and neither should middle or elementary schools. Every grade in school is just as important as any other. What year would you advise your own child to take off? Most likely you would want every year of schooling to be a quality experience. Everyone must come to accept the fact that every minute counts with every student. I used to believe that low-performing ninth graders had three more years to catch up. However, I learned through practice, now supported by research that those students would most likely drop out. The reality is that marginal middle school students fail in high school. Students do not suddenly lose their math or literacy skills when they walk through the doors of a high school, nor can they suddenly make up a three-year deficit after entering high school. If, as a high school principal, I were given a choice between receiving a federal turnaround grant or having students arrive at my school on-target for post-secondary education, I would not hesitate to choose the latter. I learned the hard way that waiting for students to fall behind and then spending large amounts of money to catch them up is a high-risk strategy doomed to fail.

The Funding Gap

While most would agree that every year in school is important, that is not how federal funding has flowed. In fact, when it comes to funding, the federal recording has been stuck on elementary schools for years. Policy makers have erroneously believed that a strong beginning in the early grades would carry students to success in later years. That may work for advantaged middle class students, but for under-resourced students this plan has been a disaster. In literacy for example, students who do not come from language enriched home environments need direct, explicit literacy instruction each and every year or they will not progress. To the shock and dismay of our elementary principals and teachers, our school had a significant number of students reading at grade level at the end of the third grade who were two to three years behind by grade nine.

Not ready for prime time

I once watched an assistant superintendent summarily promote a whole stack of unsuccessful students because they had simply been retained too many times. Many overage and under-credited students arrive at high school because they were “too tall to retain” any longer. They arrive with a history of low achievement, unable to read their textbook, and lacking basic computational skills. Despite that fact that only 20% of eighth graders are on target to be college-, career-, and workplace-ready, high schools are under extreme pressure to prepare students for postsecondary success.

Graduation and Dropouts

High schools are the only schools held to measures of accountability that include graduation rate, dropout rate, end-of-course exams and barrier tests. The fact is that students begin dropping out long before they reach high school.

Range of Learners

Diverse high schools with significant numbers of second-language learners like ours had students with skill levels that ranged from kindergarten through the second year of college. Our elementary principals were surprised to see that our library contained many of the same books as their own.

Size and Complexity

As we go higher in the grades the complexity of the course content and the curriculum increases dramatically. Today’s high school curriculum is extremely complex. Many high schools offer twenty or more AP or IB courses along with dual enrollment classes, CTE programs, and work-study programs. In addition they offer host of standard level courses including electives in the fine and performing arts. High schools tend to be larger because it is impossible to offer the variety of offerings in a smaller school.

Systemic Failure

My last superintendent didn’t particularly like it when I said “Whatever happens in the school system good or bad manifests itself at the high school level.” High schools are at the end of the assembly line. Whatever was or was not corrected along the way surfaces at the high school level. A number of experts have come to believe that weak schools are a result of dysfunctional district leadership and the failure to construct a properly aligned K-12 instructional program. Strong district leadership is a prerequisite to individual school success.

Our current national strategy is to stand at the end of the assembly line and inspect for defects. We are not yet about building quality into the entire K-12 process. We are still stuck in trying to inspect for quality, and that will not render the kind of results that we are looking for. Helping each and every student acquire the solid math and literacy skills they need in order to succeed in every content area is a K-12 issue and cannot be accomplished by remediating large numbers of students who were passed through the grades with glaring skill deficiencies and allowed to languish in failure and mediocrity.

It is true that the work of turning around elementary and middle schools is “potentially easier.” However, we have a moral and ethical responsibility to all students. We cannot afford to ignore millions of high school students simply because they are not the easiest to work with.

Finally, we do know how to turn around high schools. There is now an extensive body of evidence that support to successful turnaround efforts. However, high school turnaround is not easy and it takes time. In most cases, it takes at least three to five years to change the culture of a high school. Arne Duncan was right. When it comes to high school turnaround, there are no silver bullets.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 02:44 PM | Permalink

“To send a student off to college without having had an AP, IB, or Cambridge course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels. It is dumb, and in my view a form of educational malpractice. But most American high schools still do it.” – Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

I recently spoke at a conference on the new Common Core Standards and our need to improve the literacy skills, not of just our lowest performing students, but of all students. In my talk, I indicated that less than 20% of high school students pass an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam before graduating, which corresponded closely to the percent of ninth graders who graduate from college ten years later.

Shortly after our session had ended, I received the following email:

"I was very curious about the AP statistics you cited near the end of your talk, as they didn't align to my current understanding of the passage rates. If my memory serves me correct, I believe (our) passage rate in 2009 was around 38%, which is why I was surprised when I heard we might be above the national average!

While USA Today may certainly not be the most robust source for the data, a February 2010 article stated that the 2009 national failure rate (score or 1 or 2) was 41.5%.  As such, the national passage rate was 58.5%.

The article provides, in true USA Today fashion, a colorful map of the state-by-state failure rates (ranging from 26.5% to 70.3%)."

My first reaction was that I had somehow misstated the facts. So, I immediately checked my computer for a recent article on AP pass rates. As it turns out, when I indicated that less than 20% of graduates took and passed an AP exam, that was an overstatement. The percentage of high school graduates who pass at least one AP exam is 15.9%. Keep in mind that the 15.9% represents those students who actually took the AP exam. It is no secret that many students enroll in AP courses but do not sit for the exam.

Remember, high school students enrolled in these courses have a full school year to complete the work, while their college counterparts have a single semester. Therefore, in less than ninety days these graduates will be enrolled in college courses that are moving at twice the speed of an AP or IB course. How do you think graduates who cannot pass an AP or IB exam will do in college? My guess is that they will struggle.

The bottom line is that we have a lot of work to do to get even our best students college-ready. If you don’t believe me, give your students a diagnostic reading test that reports in lexiles. The new Common Core Standards (Appendix A) indicate that a 1300 lexile reading level for seniors equates to being college-ready. We did assess all of our students and we were shocked at how few were even in range of being college-ready. We all have work to do!

Fact: Only 6% of 27,000 U.S. high schools have half of their graduates take at least one AP or IB course in both their junior and senior year.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There was a time not that long ago that the mere mention of summer school sent my fellow principals and me looking for an exit. Our district would rotate summer school sites from school to school and principals would devise every type of excuse to keep from being one of those sites. The idea of having someone invade our building for an entire summer was unthinkable. Having a different administrative and teaching staff in our house was viewed as a punishment.

Then accountability hit. The focus shifted from what adults wanted to what our students needed. Our school was diverse and poor. Over time, we discovered that our students could achieve at high levels if they were given the additional time they needed to master course content. Conversely, if we held learning time constant for all students, we would ensure that a significant proportion of them would fail.

It turned out that learning time was more critical for our students than improved teaching methods or smaller classes. That is not to say that methods or class setting are not important, but, for our poor, under-resourced students, learning time proved to be the most important factor. We learned that improving instruction was an ongoing process that would never end, but, if some of our students learned some subjects at different rates, improved methods could only go so far.

As a result of what we had learned about instructional time and student success, I did a complete about face on the issue of summer school. The turning point for me came when an analysis of our data indicated that our students were actually losing ground over the summer. All the hard work and progress we made during the regular school year was eaten away by ten weeks of summer learning loss.

In fact, I became such a strong believer in varying learning time that I was willing to publicly challenge our superintendent by saying, “Just give me the time that our students spend riding the bus to and from central summer school sites, and we will double their achievement. If our students could be in our school with our teachers during the summer, we will not only increase enrollment, but we will significantly increase student achievement.”

To my surprise he said yes. Not surprisingly, our student achievement skyrocketed. Instead of 10% of our students attending summer school, we had 30% attending. Instead of our second language students losing English language skills over the summer, they actually gained in English acquisition. Instead of summer school being an afterthought, it became an integral part of our program because it met the needs of our student in the following ways:

Catch Up – Students, particularly our second language students, needed extra time to acquire English language skills. Thus, they tended to need more time to fulfill requirements for graduation. Even though these students were fluent in two languages, they viewed themselves as failures if they did not graduate when they were eighteen. Summer school afforded these students a way to squeeze five years of high school into four calendar years.

Extra Time – Some students, particularly many of our math students needed an extra semester to master algebra. In our state, all students had to pass Algebra I and the Algebra I end-of-course exam in order to graduate. Allowing students the option of completing a course in summer school dramatically increased the success rate of our students without lowering standards.

Make Up – We set a goal that all ninth graders would graduate to tenth grade. We had learned that reducing failure and the need to repeat courses was a win-win for everyone. However, no matter how hard we worked to keep students from falling behind, some did. In addition, many students who had transferred into our school had failed one or more core courses in their previous school. For these students, summer school was a necessity.

Credit Recovery - Summer school was the keystone of our credit recovery efforts. The problem is that, in a state with end-of-course exams, our students had to do more than complete a course by putting in seat time. They actually had to learn something and demonstrate that learning on a state exam.

Get ahead – Many of our students were schooled in other countries and lost a year or more converting into our system. In addition, some students were scheduled to return to their native land and needed to graduate in less than four years. Our high student mobility meant that many students lost learning time and credits moving from school to school. Summer school offered these students the opportunity to graduate early and to move on to college.

Enrichment – Summer school provided opportunities for students with crowded schedules to take elective or enrichment classes during the summer.

The Bottom Line

If we are really serious about raising student achievement, we must address variations in learning time for our students. Holding time constant guarantees that achievement will vary widely, particularly for under-resourced students. Making learning time the variable will ensure that we move much closer to learning becoming a constant for each and every student.

Posted by Mel Riddile at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)