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DPS’ response to the credit recovery controversy

Monday, June 6th, 2011

Editor’s note: This post was submitted to Education News Colorado by Antwan Wilson, Denver Public Schools’ assistant superintendent, office of post-secondary readiness. It offers the district’s response to this blog post from EdNews Publisher Alan Gottlieb, and this article from Westword.

I wanted to take this opportunity to address the concerns raised in recent media reports about the credit recovery at North High School.

The issues raised in the report are very serious ones, and we are actively investigating the claims and reviewing our overall credit-recovery procedures.  Should we find violations of our guidelines or ethical standards or the need to implement clearer or stronger policies, we will take action to ensure the integrity and rigor of that program and all of our programs.  We certainly recognize that for our diplomas to have value, our programs must be – and be seen as – rigorous.

In addressing the concerns about rigor, it’s important to take a minute to discuss the purpose of credit recovery and where it fits in our overall high school programs.

To date, that investigation has determined at a minimum that there were serious deficiencies in following procedures and keeping records during the 2009-10 school year.

First, a word on rigor.  Over the past several years, the Denver Public Schools has significantly strengthened the rigor of its high school programs. The district has increased the number of credits required for graduation from 220 to 240 (the highest in the state to our knowledge) by adding a fourth year of math and additional lab-science requirement, among other changes.

We have nearly doubled the number of students taking and receiving college credit from Advanced Placement courses over the past five years, and we have also nearly tripled the number of students concurrently enrolled in college-level courses.

The percent of concurrently enrolled students receiving As, Bs, or Cs in these college level courses (and therefore college credit) is over 80 percent. And these increases cross all racial and socioeconomic groups. Our district also has posted double-digit gains in math and reading proficiency on state assessments over the past five years.

Our mission at DPS is to ensure that all of our students graduate high school and successfully pursue postsecondary opportunities and become successful world citizens.  This is an important mission in that it sets a high bar that requires that we implement a system district-wide that meets the needs of all of our students regardless of who they are, where they come from, or what their previous academic performance may have been.

Aligning mission to Denver Plan

This mission aligns with the 2010 Denver Plan goal of being the best urban school district in the country.  It says that we recognize and appreciate the diversity within our student population and the many unique needs of our students and we are making it our responsibility to construct a system that prepares all students for success in the college and career opportunities they seek.

In order to fulfill this mission, we need to acknowledge where we are currently (a roughly 53 percent overall on-time graduation rate/66 percent for traditional high schools); we need to understand the challenges that negatively impacted efforts to improve in the past; and we need to work to construct a comprehensive system that better meets the needs of the students we serve.

Doing this requires improvement in how effectively we educate the entire child from kindergarten through 12th grade.  This includes raising the bar for all students in terms of academic rigor and expectations at all grades and at the same time implementing sufficient supports to ensure that students meet these expectations. We want our most motivated and successful students to know that they are noticed and appreciated, and that they will be challenged to reach their highest potential. At the same time we want our students who experience struggles to know that we expect them to be successful as well and will do what it takes to see that they too reach their potential.

This potential involves preparation for education beyond high school. Whether they be four-year universities and colleges, two-year community colleges or technical schools, or one-year certificated programs and/or military service, our goal is to prepare all of our students to enter these institutions having mastered the necessary standards and without the need for remediation.

In addition to implementing rigorous grading standards, we also recognize that we must have strong support systems when students fail to meet expectations or do not respond to the initial interventions by the classroom teacher and school leadership. Our students have a responsibility to learn, and we recognize that there are some students who have not mastered the study skills necessary to gain subject matter proficiency in their studies. In such cases, these students will earn failing scores and this will require us to provide more intensive supports to help them meet expectations.

Confronting tough challenges

Again, if we are to accomplish our mission to graduate all students and prepare them all to be postsecondary ready, we cannot give up when faced with these challenges. For these students, we will provide targeted support that helps them get back on the right path. These supports include, but are not limited to, interventions such as unit and credit recovery.

Unit recovery should be implemented as an on-time intervention after a student has not demonstrated mastery of content in a major unit of study while enrolled in a class. It consists of the collaboration between the classroom teacher and the student (with the support of school leaders) to re-take a unit that the student failed to master through the demonstration of competency on specific unit standards. This may occur in the classroom, online, or in a blended model.

Credit recovery, on the other hand, involves a student retaking a course they have previously failed. This is typically done in a blended learning environment involving online curriculum and assessments with instructional support provided by a teacher. We are partnering with APEX Learning on these efforts because of the rigor and comprehensiveness of their programs. Their programs are used across the nation in many urban districts to provide original credit, Foundational Courses, Literacy Intervention, Advance Placement courses and preparation, and unit and credit recovery. APEX is accredited by the Northwest Accreditation Commission and approved by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

In order to ensure the rigor of our credit recovery courses, the courses are each supervised by a teacher and the student receives individualized instruction as well as working online. Individual assignments emphasize the mastery of essential state standards, as in traditional courses, and students must demonstrate through assignments mastery of each individual unit before they can move on to the final exam.

To pass a credit recovery course, a student must obtain a score of 80 percent or better, which is 20 points higher than in a traditional course that has a required semester of seat time.  Students in a blended learning environment should be supervised at all times and all assessments should be closely monitored as expected in all classrooms. When taking tests and quizzes, students (except as may be provided for in an IEP) may not use of books, notes, web sites, or any other aids.

A thorough investigation

We are doing a thorough investigation of credit-recovery practices and auditing graduation transcripts at North High School to determine if these guidelines were not followed. To date, that investigation has determined at a minimum that there were serious deficiencies in following procedures and keeping records during the 2009-10 school year.

We will continue a thorough and comprehensive review of credit-recovery at North and ensure that the shortcomings at that school from last year are not repeated in other programs throughout the district. We continue to believe strongly in the important role that unit and credit recovery play in our schools, as they do in districts nationwide.

It has long been clear that the old way of requiring a student who fails a course to repeat it again the following year in the same classroom fashion that the student failed it the first time is ineffective and leads to a big increase in dropouts. Our data clearly shows that the highest number of student dropouts fell off track during their ninth grade year due to failing core classes. Data also shows that it is increasingly harder to get these students on track the longer they are allowed to remain off track to graduate. The solution here must be to ensure the rigor of unit and credit recovery offerings, not to do away with them.

We must also face the question, as Mr. Gottlieb points out: “Whether the pressure exerted on high schools to improve graduation rates tacitly encourages school administrators to juke the stats to make themselves and the district look better.”

We acknowledge that this incentive exists here as in many places elsewhere.  The incentive to make oneself or one’s unit look as good as possible statistically is true regardless of whether you’re measuring graduation rates, financial performance, academic achievement, or athletic performance. The problem of teachers and schools having incentives to pass students on to graduation by reducing rigor long predates and extends far beyond credit recovery.

The question then is, how do you deal with the fact that these incentives have existed, do exist, and will exist. The answer cannot be to stop measuring or caring about our schools’ graduation rates. For that is clearly one of the most important measures of a high school.  Rather, the answer can only be in the district having a strong combination of clear procedures, ethical practices, and strong action to address of any violations.

As part of this effort, I convened earlier this year a task force of teachers and school leaders to clarify and strengthen grading policies, with clear alignment to state standards. Grades should not be based on process elements, like attendance, but on demonstrated proficiency through multiple assignments and test on the elements of the state standards the course is covering.

Setting high expectations for all

Students who are demonstrating an inability to complete assignments as expected by teachers should receive immediate intervention or consequences, depending upon the reason for not completing the work. This may include mandatory tutoring classes before school, at lunch, after school, or during the school day. It may also mean shortening the student’s academic class schedule to include core academic classes and a favorite elective, and then providing targeted study sessions the remainder of the day, with very small teacher-to-student ratios focused on supporting students with the completion at mastery level of work assigned by classroom teachers.

We cannot allow our students to choose to fail and for them to believe that we will do nothing to prevent it.  Teachers are NOT to give students either full or partial credit for work they did not do. In fact, we have taken recent action to end a grading practice at one of our high schools that allowed teachers to give a grade of 53 percent to students who missed an assignment.

Missing work is to be marked as missing in the grade book, and interventions are to be implemented immediately to support students who need additional instruction to complete the task or to hold students accountable for completing what was expected of them by their classroom teacher. Like school grading and measurement policies, school makeup work policies should be communicated effectively to all students, parents, and other stakeholders and consistently implemented throughout the school without exception.

We are here as public servants in the field of education for the sole purpose of giving ALL of our students the skills and confidence they need to make their dreams come true. We expect a lot from them and from ourselves. We work hard to challenge, support, and inspire our students. We do not accept excuses for failure; we will not tolerate dishonesty in reporting student achievement; and, we will never give up on a single student.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Posted in Accountability, featured, Grad/dropout rates | 4 Comments »

The graduation-proficiency gap in DPS

Monday, June 6th, 2011

Alexander Ooms is a member of the board of the Charter School Institute, the West Denver Preparatory Charter School and the Colorado chapter of Stand for Children.

The recent Westword article on Denver North High School’s manipulation of its graduation rates, the  belief that “juking the stats” likely spreads beyond a single school and a sage comment at the end of Alan’s post wondering what other Denver high schools were affected all indicate that this is a topic where rhetoric might benefit from a closer relationship with data.

At its crux, the question is if graduation rates tell us something meaningful about how district schools are performing academically. And it sure looks like they do, but not in the way one might have hoped.

For what the North debacle — and a previous yet related controversy over Lincoln High School — bring into question is twofold. First, does a high school diploma signify a reasonable, baseline level of student achievement; and second, is the rise in DPS’s graduation rate spread evenly throughout the district or is being used by some schools to mask a lack of academic rigor and proficiency.

To answer the first question, we need to see if there a pervasive gap  – particularly at certain schools — between a school’s graduation rate and the ability of its alums to read, write, and do math at grade level.  As one teacher at North commented for the Wesword article, are we reaching a point where someone could say “Oh, they went to North? They’ll give a diploma to anyone” – and for how many schools might this be an issue?

So here is a quick graph comparing respective 2010 graduation rates (data here) and 2010 average proficiency rates* (from CDE’s schoolview.org) at a number of notable, open-enrollment DPS high schools.

The red line indicates the trend; the schools above the line will have more students who graduate with solid academic skills; those below the line will have more graduates who lack basic proficiency. How far you are from the line shows the gap: well above the line pretty much guarantees a close correlation between graduation and at least a base level of academic ability; well below the line increases the likelihood that a diploma has little relation to academic skills.

What do we see? Joining North below the trendline and as prominent outliers are Bruce Randolph and MLK – both of whom have graduation rates within spitting distance of 90 percent, and yet proficiency rates that are but a small fraction of those numbers. Also below the trendline, but somewhat closer, are Kennedy and Montbello; while Lincoln teeters just above the line but with poor scores on both. And perhaps this will surprise no one, but is is exactly these schools who have had the most recent progress with graduation rates, and DPS has not been shy on trumpeting this data as a mark of success.

The recent increases in DPS graduation rates seem to be driven by precisely this same set of schools — all of whom lag badly in academic proficiency.  While both Bruce Randolph and MLK are graduating their first class and don’t have previous data, the other schools all have double-digit percentage increases from 2009 (North 21 percent, Kennedy 17 percent, Montbello 15 percent and Lincoln 14 percent), while the four schools with higher proficiency saw far smaller jumps (East 4 percent, GW 6 percent, DSST 8 percent, and  TJ 10 percent).

So, are these schools masking their poor academic progress with the easier task of boosting graduation rates?  Should we celebrate these schools for their progress with graduation rates (as President Obama did with Bruce Randolph), or question why few of their graduates are able to do basic academic work? Particularly for administrators (as the Westword article showed), it may be far easier to achieve — ethically or not — higher graduation percentages (and proclaim your school a success) then the more difficult work of driving better academic results. Should one obscure the other, or should the two go hand-in-hand.

Mind the Gap

To look at the same data a slightly different way, here is a table showing the same schools, this time ranked on the final column of a graduation-to-proficiency gap (the ratio of graduation percentage over average proficiency).

There is one school with a graduation rate significantly above the mean, and a proficiency rate significantly below the mean: Bruce Randolph.  North places second, and it is testimony to its low proficiency that they do so while still ranking significantly below the mean in graduation rate.  Montbello manages the largest gap with stunning inadequacy at both ends, including some single-digit proficiency scores and the second-lowest graduation rate overall. Lincoln and MLK round out the quintet of schools where the numbers look askew (with Kennedy pretty close behind). While it is a somewhat arbitrary line, a gap ratio greater than 2:1 is a good place for further examination.

Does this mean that some of these schools, along with North, are “juking their stats”? It’s not clear – many are also achieving higher than average academic growth (including Bruce Randolph and MLK) — but then again, diplomas are intended to indicate some measure of academic proficiency, not growth.  And, as Westword pointed out, North, Montbello and Lincoln all have full-blown Credit Recovery centers offering a different (and let’s be honest and say a far less rigorous) path to graduation. In many ways, in boosting graduation rates — and any lowering of standards to ease the path to a diploma as is clearly the case at North — these schools are probably digging their proficiency holes even deeper.  It means not just that these schools may fulfill the fear articulated by the teacher at North of awarding a diploma to just about anyone, but that the gap may increase still further.

And, perhaps more importantly, does it even matter if the heightened graduation rates are “juked” (with programs such as online Credit Recovery) or honestly achieved if they are not accompanied by increased academic proficiency? In 2010, DPS increased its graduation rate by 5.4 percent but saw a boost in overall proficiency of just 1.3 percent (and that was for all schools – I’d bet for traditional high schools the proficiency increase was probably flat).  If you were a school administrator, where would you put your efforts (and what can you better control)? And if you were DPS, to which measure would you prefer to highlight?

Is Graduation an Academic Measure?

For the larger issue is a point on which there is surprising disagrement: Is it the primary purpose of public schools to graduate students with a certain threshold of academic skill?

A surprising number of people – some of them friends, many of them reasonable – argue that, particularly in high-poverty urban schools, academic achievement is subordinated to other measures. Advocates of these schools would say that increased graduation rates means kids are not dropping out, are meeting other metrics of responsibility (such as attendence and basic class assignments) to earn passing grades, and are absorbing critical social and other skills that leave them more mature and better equipped for their lives after high school.  Under this rubric, it is an achievement to simply keep these kids in school at all.

Detractors would argue that the purpose of schools is not simply to warehouse kids in a safe facility and build social aptitude, but to impart some basic level of academic ability, and that allowing them to graduate without these skills may do more harm than good, particularly when many of these students — who have, after all, successfully passed their classes — have no idea that they are ill-prepared compared to many of their peers, and will quickly find that the demands of college or the modern workforce far outstrip their preparation. There is no second chance at K-12 education.

A related problem involves rising remediation rates – the percentages of students who go to college who are unprepared and have to retake classes at a high-school level.  As Alan pointed out just over a year ago, this is a state-wide issue, but many of these same DPS schools (North, Montbello, Lincoln) are again leading the pack. There is a good and reasonable debate on what these remediation numbers really mean, but at a minimum, the relative differences between schools is cause for apprehension.  And in looking at proficiency scores, we are talking here about something even more fundamental – not just if students are prepared to continue on to higher education, but for those who have decided to stop (or are unable to continue) their scholastic careers, do they have the academic skills that one might expect after 13 years of public education?

Several states now require some independent assessment for graduation. California, by way of example, has a High School Exit Exam, which survived a considerable legal challenge on its way to becoming law. When they first instituted the test, nearly 20 percent of seniors failed it. Recent classes have done better. This exam is hardly draconian: one gets eight chances to pass, the test measures English at a 10th grade level and Math at an 8th grade level, and it requires just 60 percent or less of correct answers to pass. But if you have a high school diploma in California, it has a set meaning – one that connotes something of value to both its student recipients and the employers who seek to hire them. Does a diploma in Denver have the same meaning?

For these diplomas are widely viewed as a critical and central measure of public education. In the most recent (and final) mayoral debate, both candidates criticized DPS’s current 52 percent graduation rate and singled out graduation percentages as an important metric they would track to better understand the success and progress (or lack thereof) of public education in Denver. Graduation rates were mentioned more times than any other single metric, academic or otherwise.

As moderator of the debate, I asked both candidates about the graduation problems at North, and if they favored an independent academic assessment at graduation (or at other points in K-12 education) so that a DPS diploma would indicate a certain level of academic achievement. Both candidates somewhat slipped past the question without answering it directly (hear the question and responses in the full podcast at 36:30 to 40:40 via link or download).

Asking for a higher graduation rate without also wanting to measure or interpret what it may mean is the norm, and not just for politicians. This is partly due to the heightened political climate of Denver’s education debate, where a reform-oriented administration pumps up some stats beyond what they may deserve, while any negative news is seized by defenders of the status quo as a way to criticize the superintendent and  weaken the administration and its reforms. This discourse makes rational discussion increasingly difficult.

But aside from the political theatre, the people who are harmed the most by the graduation-proficiency gap are the legitimate students from many of these schools who have worked hard and justly earned their diplomas, only to find this achievement largely debased both by the actions of their peers, and a system that — rightly or wrongly — seems to increasingly use the mantra of “multiple measures of achievement” to boost graduation and other metrics while undermining academic preparation and proficiency. This, after all, is the blunt narrative at the heart of public education’s problems: adults fighting each other to protect jobs and for political supremacy while kids suffer.

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* Note: It might be more accurate for a particular class to use 10th grade proficiency from 2008 (since this will be the graduation class in 2010), but I thought it was a more complete to look at the proficiency for the school overall, and also more fair if a school has had significant academic progress in intermittent two years.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Posted in Accountability, featured, Grad/dropout rates, High school reform | 5 Comments »

A North High diploma mill?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

This excellent piece of reporting by Westword’s Melanie Asmar exposes some scandalous practices in the “credit recovery” program at Denver’s North High School. As a fomer North teacher says at the article’s conclusion:

“What sucks is that there are kids working their butts off for a diploma to mean something and there are kids getting diplomas from North who have earned every single credit on there plus more,” says Brown. “Then a bunch of other kids get the same diploma, and it devalues it.”

She adds, “I’d hate for…people to look at a transcript and say, ‘Oh, they went to North? They’ll give a diploma to anyone.’”

Watch for this story to change some practices at North and probably other DPS high schools.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Posted in featured, Grad/dropout rates, High school reform | 1 Comment »

Fixing the education pipeline

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

This post was submitted by Dr. Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York and the co-creator of Strive.

I’ll say at the outset that as an outsider to Colorado politics, I am not an expert on the candidates who are running to be the next mayor of Denver. But as a lifelong educator who has studied urban school issues for decades and helped create and implement successful reforms in Cincinnati and other cities, I would offer this advice to start: Elect the candidate who can bring this community together on education reform.

This is not simply a matter of opinion. Rather, it is a growing national consensus and the thrust behind a data-driven, evidence-based movement that’s been gathering steam among educators in recent years: In order to have educated, successful adults, we need to construct a solid education pipeline that runs straight from cradle to career. I readily accepted the invitation to participate in this week’s Great Teachers for Our City Schools National Summit in Denver because I see it as an excellent opportunity to share inspiring data on what’s happening in a few cities around the country.

The first five years of a child’s life are crucial in building a strong foundation for lifelong learning skills like critical thinking, language development, and problem-solving and social skills. This naturally leads to the idea that children need to be guided into education very early in life, and be programmatically supported in and out of the school setting all the way along the pipeline to ensure that they are prepared to succeed every step of the way until they begin their careers.

What we are finding is that there is an answer to this dauntingly tall order, and it lies in adopting a collaborative approach to building and strengthening the pipeline. In short, there is no single answer, no Superman solution and no silver bullet when it comes to education reform. It takes time, and lots of hard work from invested and interested community stakeholders to effect positive change.

Enter the Strive framework for education reform, a collective-impact approach, that I helped create in 2006. Since then, Strive’s “cradle-to-career” networks have made remarkable advances in public school districts in greater Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. Measurable improvements include increases in the number of preschool children prepared for kindergarten, improved fourth-grade reading and math scores and higher rates of high school graduation. Even college enrollment among graduates from public high schools has gone up by 10 percent. And at Northern Kentucky University and the University of Cincinnati, graduation rates for students from the local urban area high schools have increased by 10 and 7 percent, respectively.

The success of the Strive approach is based on the commitment of its influential, motivated participants from different sectors—local government, business, school districts, universities and colleges and non-profit and advocacy groups—who have collaborated to solve a specific social problem—rethinking, reorganizing, and redirecting existing resources to promulgate systemic changes and new approaches to problem solving that works. The framework is not meant to be a cookie cutter; rather, it is meant to be adapted to local needs. This is the key to Strive’s success, as we’ve begun to see in Houston; Oakland; Portland, Ore., and parts of New York state, where the Strive approach is being used.

We can have all the valuable, brilliant resources in the world in place to make sure that pipeline is continuous and secure—but none of that will matter if we don’t have effectively trained teachers in our classrooms, successfully guiding and supporting students every step of the way.

It’s clear then that an essential aspect of education reform must be concentrating our efforts on teacher education and preparation, making absolutely certain that every teacher who enters the classroom is clinically prepared, both pedagogically and in subject matter, with the same kind of readiness we’d expect of a pilot in a cockpit.

Last year, I co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Panel convened by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) that, in itself, represented a largely unprecedented consensus. State officials, P-12 and higher education leaders, teachers, teacher educators, union representatives and critics of teacher education were all represented on the panel, which uniformly called for system-wide changes in how the U.S. prepares and supports its 4 million teachers.

A major recommendation of the panel was to move teacher preparation to a clinically based model. This will involve a major structural change, shifting responsibility and accountability for teacher preparation from solely that of higher education to a shared P-12/higher education model.

It makes sense. Teachers who serve districts rife with economic and social challenges that inevitably manifest themselves in struggling public schools not only require, but deserve, the most sophisticated, best quality clinical practice preparation if they’re going to be effective in the classroom. And teacher support can’t end with the awarding of a degree: higher education should be a constant resource for training and best practices for P-12 educators for the length of their careers.

It is a myth that one person or group can cure our education ills by themselves, no matter how visionary or passionate. Only by working together, by engaging public and private institutions of higher education, public schools, civic leaders and elected officials, will we see real, measurable, and sustainable results. Success in Denver—and in every U.S. school district—will rise or fall on collaboration, on how successfully we rally all stakeholders around a common effort to achieve our goals and implement meaningful reform.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Posted in Achievement gaps, Alternative pathways, featured, Grad/dropout rates, High school reform | 1 Comment »

What dropouts cost society, themselves

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

This speaks for itself. Any statisticians care to comment on the methodology? Here is where to find other major U.S. cities.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Posted in Grad/dropout rates | 1 Comment »

College Summit gets Nobel

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

College Summit's J.B. Schramm

College Summit, is a non-profit with strong Colorado ties. Its founder, JB. Schramm, is a graduate of Denver’s East High School. The 17-year-old program, which address the under-enrollment of capable low-income youth in college, works in several Colorado districts, most notably Mapleton, where college-going rates have gone up and dropout rates down since College Summit appeared on the scene.

Today, College Summit learned that it is one of 10 non-profits across the country that will receive a share — $125,000 –of President Obama’s $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize award. Susan Bross, executive director of College Summit’s Colorado chapter, says a portion of the money will go to the organization’s Colorado work.

Here is a list of all the charities getting a slice of Obama’s Nobel money.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Posted in Grad/dropout rates | No Comments »

Clogged pipes

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Alan Gottlieb and Nancy Mitchell did a great job highlighting one of the most important indicators of a public education pipeline and high school.

Are Colorado urban high schools and their school districts preparing kids to enter college without needing remediation?

Unfortunately in many cases, the answer is a resounding NO.  I do wonder whether any district or schools can make progress given high school structures, history and culture.    We’ve got 30 years of failed attempts to transform existing urban high schools; here’s hoping there’s more thoughtful reflection on these failures so new schools can be made to work for most kids.

This remediation data raises a number of very important questions that few policy makers or educators seem to be taking seriously these days in spite of all kinds of mostly good new reforms.

This remediation data is probably one of if not the most important measure of quality when thinking about the future of our democracy, communities and economy.

  1. What does this say about the 20th century high school design/practices for low-income students?
  2. Why is this remediation data not provided to kids and families when entering these schools?
  3. Why doesn’t Colorado connect our student level data to the National Student Clearing House data so that we can accurately track how every Colorado high school graduate does when entering higher education throughout the US?
  4. How should remediation data be included in a new 2.0 version of a Colorado Report Card for High Schools (you’d think more policy makers would be calling for one using all the various data sources including the growth measures)?
  5. What’s the “return on investment” on preparing college ready students?   My estimates are that Denver’s West High school’s “return on investment” for college ready graduates is about $3,000,000 per college ready graduate compared to Denver School of Science and Technology at about $70,000 per student (blog post to follow) .

Popularity: 19% [?]

Posted in Grad/dropout rates, High school reform | 1 Comment »

Easy out, easy in

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

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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Lower dropout rates in rural schools

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Interesting segment from Colorado Public Radio’s “Colorado Matters” program on why the state’s rural schools have the lowest dropout rates. Have a listen:

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Attacking the dropout problem at its roots

Friday, October 30th, 2009

It’s great that the Colorado Children’s Campaign and others  are once again beating the drum about Colorado’s little known and ridiculously expensive dropout problem.  In Donnell-Kay’s excellent report there is good analysis of the problem and a great set of recommendations for changing the tide by creating early warning systems and developing new alternative schools to recapture students.

My one critique of this work is that there appears little or no discussion of a root cause of the problem, our big dysfunctional middle and high schools. Any work on solving the dropout problem needs to take a close look at the school system that is generating the dropouts.  A significant number of dropouts could be reduced by having secondary schools where adults were responsible for really knowing kids and supporting every student’s learning.  And by the way, we know this is possible now.

A number of Denver Metro high schools (Westminster, North, West, North, Hinckley, East, Lincoln, etc) have grade 9 to 12 cohort graduation rates of about 50% or less .  Several of these Colorado “dropout factories” are graduating less than one third of the students that enter.

Can you imagine having a hospital that was only designed for one third of the patients to leave healthy? Think of the size of the morgue.  Trying to tweak these monolithic urban secondary school systems that were never intended to have more than one third of kids prepared for college is hardly a winning strategy for building strong twenty-first century economies and communities.

I doubt that we will be able to make much of a dent in the numbers until we come back to the fundamental question of how secondary schools should be designed to support every student to graduate ready for college.  We can’t afford not to follow Donnell Kay’s recommendations, while simultaneously and dramatically increasing our efforts to create new secondary schools where the vast majority of kids stay engaged and get prepared for college.

If we do not address the more fundamental issues of school design and systems in our middle and high schools, we will be do little than add a few band aids to a very broken system.

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