Attendance is to school what rebounding is to basketball—it is hard work, requires effort and persistence, and it often goes unrewarded and unrecognized, but schools can’t be successful without it.
Archive for the ‘Graduation Rates’ Category
The Wrong Message
January 25th, 2012
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Raising the age to 18 sent the right message to our students. Education is critically important!
Miss School and Miss Out
January 11th, 2012
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Graduation Rates: Mission Impossible
August 5th, 2011
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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 [...]
Graduation Rates Plummet
July 28th, 2011
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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 [...]
Literacy: Third Grade Reading Predicts Graduation
April 11th, 2011
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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 [...]
An Education Obsession
February 24th, 2011
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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 [...]
More Testing For High Schools
December 30th, 2010
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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, [...]
Class Size: As Though They Were Our Own
December 13th, 2010
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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 [...]
Attendance: How do we improve if no one shows up?
December 3rd, 2010
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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 [...]
