The recent report on dropout prevention and recovery from the National Governor’s Association’s Center for Best Practices has as one of its recommendations raising the maximum compulsory age of schooling to 18 and creating penalties – loss of driver’s licenses or work permits – if students leave earlier.
The goal is to create a public policy statement that staying in school matters. But the result would be a burdensome layer of record-keeping and enforcement whose fruition would be an adversarial relationship between high schools and teenagers.
Of course it is desirable for students to stay in school for as long as possible and it is better yet if they master the curriculum and graduate. But given the reasons the report itself identifies for school leaving — academic failure, disinterest in school, problematic behavior (getting suspended or expelled) and life events – mandating school retention is unlikely to make a real difference in learning even as it creates big problems for high school staff.
If we actually address the causes of dropping out it will be the rare student who leaves school before completion. So let’s put our energy into something positive instead of picking fights with young people who are practically adults.
What makes much more sense is the report’s recommendation to find ways for out-of-school youth, and particularly those most at risk, to easily return to schooling when they have figured out that going back is what they want to do. School people would much rather spend their time helping a struggling student who wants to learn than facing off with a truculent 17 year old who has been made to do what he or she doesn’t want to do.
When was the last time any of you tried to make a 17 year old do what he or she didn’t want to do? The fact is that they can and will just leave unless we are prepared to use substantive legal or physical force, a wasteful use of resources. And what happens if the school “wins” and forces kids to be where they don’t want to be? My experience is that angry youth have the capacity to make the lives of their peers, teachers and administrators utterly miserable. They will disrupt class, verbally abuse their teachers, harass their peers in the hallways and dare all the adults to make them behave. Eventually they will force us to suspend them and maybe they will misbehave so badly that we will have to adjudicate them. Which would be a truly tragic ending to an otherwise colossal waste of time.
These are not the kinds of relationships we should want with teenagers. We shouldn’t be in the business of trying to make them do what they don’t want to do. We should be trying to get them to want them to want to do the things that are good for them. And it can be done – by building caring, trustworthy relationships with them; by offering meaningful and interesting classes; by creating opportunities that build on their strengths and let them shine; and by helping them with the very real problems they have in their lives. We want to win them over, not knock them down. We want to stand next to them cheering them on, instead of drawing a line in the sand and trying to force them to give in. We need their boundless energy working with us, not against us.
What we need is a system of easy in and easy out. This was the conclusion of one of my teachers after yet another round of unsuccessful effort with a genuinely reluctant learner. I agree. School would be a very different place if we would let high school students go when, for whatever reason, they can’t or won’t do school and if we would genuinely welcome them back, at any time, with all the supports in the world when they are truly ready to try.
We might find that we had dramatically more energy for helping them if we didn’t spend so much of our time trying to compel them to do what at a given point in time, they do not want to do. Why, we might even have enough energy to deal with academic deficits; to create compelling learning opportunities; to prevent problematic behavior and to help them with out of school problems
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Rona once again writes with great wisdom about teenagers; her credibility is enhanced from years of running a school where students wanted to attend and succeed.
I couldn’t disagree more with the notion that leaving school should be an option for teens. I think it is key to realize, as Rona states, that these are students who are “practically” adults. They are not adults who should have the option of leaving school. Brain research shows that some teens do not have the cognitive abililty to understand the long-term consequences of their actions.
Of course “[s]chool people would much rather spend their time helping a struggling student who wants to learn than facing off with a truculent 17 year old who has been made to do what he or she doesn’t want to do.” But this is our challenge. How do we engage these students and in many cases, their parents?
Let a student leave school and potentially allow him/her into a world of trouble on the streets?
-or-
Keep a student in school and potentially put his/her peers in a world of disorder in the classroom?
One student who has repeatedly failed, not because of a lack of academic skill, but because of a lack of academic motivation and discipline, can cause huge problems for his/her peers in the classroom. Sometimes a classroom of freshmen is derailed and perhaps even led into illicit behaviors, by one older, reluctant learner.
As a new teacher who has seen this happen in my own classroom, I am grateful for Rona’s honest assessment of the power one student holds within a school.
Yes, we need authentic relationships to help keep kids in school. No, more laws and thus more paperwork trying to force kids to stay in school will not create these relationships.
But, Mark, I don’t have a good answer to your question, how to meet the challenge. I offer an honest assessment of my own power: I cannot create an authentic relationship with any kid at any time that will motivate him/her to stay in school. I try dang hard, but there are some kids with whom I simply do not connect. Some people may have the charisma to make students listen and stay in school. But are there enough of those people in schools to really make that a viable answer to your challenge? I think no.
I come back to Rona’s assessment of students’ power.
Though teens’ brains are certainly still developing, they do have the autonomy and power to decide to keep something from working. I cannot make a student want to learn. Nor can I make a student want to stay in school. Accepting that fact is part of respecting student’s agency.
Thus, let students leave school. Let them try to get an honest job without a high school diploma. They’ll come back. Or they won’t. But schools will be more effective for more students.
Ah the Darwin approach to education. I think teachers need to recognize that while they might not be able to connect with a particual student, perhaps another teacher could. I feel your pain about certain students who can impact the entire class–it’s quite the challenge to find a way to make the experience a constructive one. But that is the challenge.
To me, the “Darwin approach” sounds more like what we do now. Kids get deselected and there is no path back for the vast majority of them. You either figure out how to navigate the system or you exit it (at a rate of about 50% these days). If you’re lucky, you just slip through the cracks. If you’re unlucky, you enter a parallel system of escalating restrictions.
I encourage us to focus less on what kids supposedly can’t do (consider the long term consequences of behavior) and more on what they can do. They can actually think about their futures, though imperfectly and with without the fluency that could come with practice. Many young people have surprising insights about their futures and since most adults don’t seem to think much about it these days, maybe we owe our kids some understanding when they have a little trouble. They’re learning.
Young people need to make real decisions in an environment in which mistakes are recoverable. Soon enough they will take on responsibility for higher-stakes decision making. For now I think we need to allow them to try out “adult” and let them fall back on “kid” when they inevitably make mistakes. We’d just better make sure someone catches them.
It’s like that cliche old team building exercise where people fall backwards and trust that someone will catch them. We’ve got kids falling flat on their backs all over the place here and I agree that compliance oriented policy will likely create a harder to solve problem.
Cory dropped out of school as a 17-year-old junior. Since he dropped out, he’s applied for a few jobs which he didn’t get, but he spends his day playing World of Warcraft. His mother had to *agree* that he could drop out. He’s GT, but he has no high aspirations for college or career because of his on-foodstamps-waitress-three-kids-all-with-different-fathers mother. Yes, I wish I could have forced him to stay in school. In the months since he dropped out, he has accomplished nothing.
My neighbor’s son dropped out when he was 17. That was 8 years ago when we moved into this house. He has also accomplished nothing. It’s hard to say if forcing him to stay in school would have changed the outcome much.
It’s not always predictable how an individual will respond to something like that. I’ve known kids who worked very hard at accomplishing nothing in school. I’ve also known kids people didn’t expect much from turn and make a go at it. Some made it (through high school anyway); some didn’t.
A well conceived organization, self-consciously on the border between school and adult life, could provide a path for more of them to make it and keep going. How do we get more of them?
And nothing like all kids get there, or even most of them, but too many seem to see the future as so unmoving that they can barely get off the couch. Or maybe it’s so moving they don’t know what to do. Maybe some just haven’t had experiences to develop the skills to imagine an exit strategy from the dead end they’ve learned awaits all dropouts. Either way, it seems like an unnecessary waste of potential.
I used to deliver that old cliche team building game, aptly named the “trust fall.” Do it a whole new way these days, ( I didn’t suggest the change, just listened to someone’s suggestion and gave it a go.), and it generates a big impact. HAve been doing it this way for over 5 years. Would never return to the old style and do my best to introduce this system to all the experiential educators out there. Telling people they need to “trust others” is such a horrible trap to train people to rely on. Frankly I view trust as one of the 10 most dangerous words.
Teens, as well as adults, really respond and it is a metaphor for this conversation. Instead of having the person “trust people to catch them” we ask them to consider it all through a different lens. People want to make a difference, have influence, contribute. A real source for our existence. We want to matter. Yeah, I know the research says, people WANT to be happy, and people loose site of the path when they have a self described experience of not being happy.( Often by virtue of thinking they trusted someone I may add.) The path is marked by contribution, influence and impact, and if we kept our eyes on those markers, well you likely get my somewhat new age drift.
So we propose that this game is about simply about having confidence in yourself. . .to trust yourself. Follow the instructions and contribute to the others by taking care of them, making a difference with them and ALLOWING them to make a difference with you as they would naturally do anything to keep you from hurting yourself even if you made a mistake.
Kind of like a student and their relationship to school, education, teachers, the future, etc.
I mean, they are in charge, (agency i now think it is called), as they have been in reality all along. When they see that, they have a real choice in the matter. (By the way, there is also evidence that this also impacts the development of the pre frontal cortex for all you interested in brain development and the implications for education reform. )
Most of my time is spent with teens, and often times their teachers, and teens from different countries, backgrounds and developmental stages. The USA teens I work with are almost always labeled, ( and they suffer the researched predictors), as being at risk of dropping out. Almost none of them do in the long run and some even manage to attend and even graduate from college. I am not one to say all MUST graduate high school , and in my time I actually worked at a school with the 42 teens the school’s educators declared they could not work with, so I understand even experienced the dilemma, yet we owe it to our communities to experiment, design, cajole and provide a space for all to give it their best shot, and allow for failing, getting up and failing again, more then we likely want to imagine. And if they drop out. . .well you can always try one more of the 10 most dangerous words, and HOPE they make it to their 18th birthday.
We don’t call that event the trust fall anymore. We call it the “Freedom Leap.”
Easy Out, Easy In, is an excellent process that should be adopted. We should allow any citizen of the United States to obtain their high school diploma regardless of age. I would add to your thoughts in this manner. We should not allow students to leave elementary school if they cannot read at the 5th grade reading level. No child should be permitted into middle school if they cannot do 5th grade writing, reading or math. Those students who cannot read or write at the middle school level should have to go to a charter school that would concentrate on helping them to read or write at the middle school level. All students who can read or write and do math at a 5th grade level should be moved to a traditional middle school. This would encourage American students, parents, teachers and administrators of public schools to take education seriously.