Battling The Dropout Epidemic

My colleagues and I at Communities In Schools have spent the past 30 years creating an antidote to our nation's dropout epidemic. It is an epidemic, and a bad one: In 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued its report "The Silent Epidemic," documenting just how bleak the situation is. Each year, almost one third of all public high school students -- and nearly one half of all blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans -- fail to graduate with their class.

America's three and a half million dropouts ages 16 to 25 are truly have-nots: They do not have a high school diploma, and as a result they have little hope for a decent future. They are far more likely than their peers to be unemployed, live in poverty, experience chronic poor health, depend upon social services, and go to jail. Half of all prison inmates are high school dropouts. In fact, on any given day, more young male dropouts are in prison than at a job.

The dropout crisis is not just an education issue -- but our education system is the arena where the battle against the dropout epidemic will be won or lost.

The truth is, my colleagues and I got into education because the kids needed it, not because we had any calling to be teachers or school administrators. As "streetworkers" in New York City in the 1960s, we worked with young people who had dropped out of school and were now homeless, on drugs, without a future. We quickly discovered that programs don't change kids -- relationships do. By forging strong personal relationships with youth, and showing them we valued them and cared about them, we were able to help turn around many young lives.

But getting a kid off the streets was only the beginning. What were they supposed to do next, with an 8th grade education at 18 years old? Like it or not, we were going to have to get involved in the "education" business.

So, beginning in 1965, we started a series of storefront schools in Harlem and the Lower East Side that we called Street Academies. The Street Academies helped thousands of dropouts earn their diplomas or GEDs, and received funding from 16 major corporations. Yet we saw two things with increasing clarity: One was that dropouts had already been scarred by the failures of the system; their road back was tough. The other was that, for all our accomplishments, more and more kids kept quitting school. Our storefront schools couldn't begin to handle the flood of young people who needed a second chance.

So the answer was obvious, though incredibly difficult to implement: We had to find a way to move our operation inside the public schools, and reach potential dropouts before they quit.

Our Street Academy movement had taken root in several other cities besides New York, and we decided to focus on Atlanta as the home for this new concept. We worked out a model that the superintendent could support, and began bringing needed human and social services into an Atlanta elementary school and high school.

Our work was based on a simple insight: Every child needs and deserves the same bedrock support that your children need. Before kids can focus on academic success, they have to have what we called the Five Basics:

* A personal, one-on-one relationship with a caring adult
* A safe place to learn and grow
* A healthy start and a healthy future
* A marketable skill to use upon graduation
* A chance to give back to peers and community

Educators, no matter how dedicated, already have too much to do -- they can't be social workers, big brothers and sisters, career counselors and hall monitors, all at the same time. It's up to the community to provide the safety net of nonacademic services that will give students these Five Basics.

Becoming a partner of the public education system was a challenge on so many levels, including the personal. I had to overcome some deep-seated feelings of inferiority about my own education. I never did well in school, and at one point my parents took me out of high school because, according to the principal, I "couldn't handle the work." Many years later, I found out that I learned differently, but back then I assumed I was dumb, and the self-image stuck with me.

But if you're motivated by loving kids, you can overcome any obstacle -- not only theirs, but your own. It's been written that "You gain your life by giving it away," and over the years I've found this to be true. As anyone will tell you who's mentored a young person, adults get more out of the relationship than they could ever put in.

The Communities In Schools strategies are now in place in more than 3,400 schools in 27 states and the District of Columbia. Each year, we reach over a million kids and their families with needed social services -- but the battle against the dropout epidemic is only beginning. If you care about kids -- and your nation's future - then I ask three things of you: your awareness, your advocacy, and your action. Stay attuned to the problem, speak up, and help your public schools create a community-based model that will serve all its children.

The dropout epidemic is a justice issue, perhaps the most crucial one we face in the U.S. As our longtime friend Jimmy Carter wrote recently, "[Poor and minority youth] are crying out for social justice, not more discrimination. Yet poor people bear the burden of our failure to create an equitable public education system." If we allow the dropout crisis to continue, it will lead to both economic and moral bankruptcy in this country.

That's a future we can't afford.

Comments

[BerylSaint]

Billions of dollars are being poured into school reform initiatives that sometimes yield more platitudes than graduates and often result in no more than "moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic."

In the mean time Communities in Schools is working with those of us on the ground level that are helping keep kids in school.

As a Richmond, Indiana school board member stated this week, “There are a lot of things that can be debated regarding education policy, but surely everyone can agree that students can’t learn if they are not attending classes.”

That's an elegantly simple statement of what needs to be done: just help kids "show up." When they do, besides getting an education, kids learn a skill that Woody Allen pointed out is essential to life ... showing up.

Helping kids show up, like Communities in Schools, is a good example of working school reform from the bottom up. Since the top-down approach has not worked since the 1960's, wouldn’t it be great to see more initiatives like Communities in Schools supported by taxpayers and foundations at the school level ... school by school ... rather than reorganizing the bureaucracies that continue to fail our high risk youth with staggering negative impact to these kids, taxpayers and society?

How can we at the ground level get traction? How can we start school reform at the neighborhood high school level as Bill Milliken did? How can we become like Communities in Schools? Who has an idea for what those of us with limited resources but ready to help can do to start up or participate in something that will make a real difference in the lives of high risk youth as Bill Milliken did?

If enough of us get at it, we might just beat the politicians, consultants and bureaucrats who are spending billions to try to fix the entire system from the top down … because their approach won't work.

[wordvarc]

Milliken is a great man.

But all of US educators pull their pinches on the primary problem in US education: School is for girls.

Since 1970 school primary and high school education has been feminized. Most educators are women. They've allowed the school day to be shortened at the expense of PE and recess time.

Boys and active girls perform far worse with no exercise.

2/3rds of all dropouts, of all suspended, of all expelled and all placed on ADHD medication are boys.

The highest SAT scores, corrected for changes made in the measure since then were in 1968 when JFK's physical fitness plan was a primary part of education. Now schools have optional PE with no showers available after vigorous activity.
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[TXfemmom]

I think this is great work and it should be sustained and enlarged.

Perhaps, if this was used to get more mentors involved in assisting with these children at an early stage, and to some degree, if possible with the entire family, then the support, education, and the influence of someone who has worked hard and succeeded can encourgage these children.

One of the thing that disturbs me the most about illegal immigration, and I live in Texas and see it up front and personally, is that the children of unodcumented workers, whether the child is illegal or was born here, drop out at over fifty percent in our area. That is and shall be a terrible drain upon society. They get involved in gangs, crime, and have families when they are ill prepared to provide and nurtur those families in a successful manner. That is not true of all the group, but fifty percent is a far higher number that among other groups, and the cost in social, criminal, and financial ways is more than society can afford.

[ADVOCATE4ZPG]

CLEARLY, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION stuffs the public schools with a burgeoning problem: Hispanic ILLEGALS enter the primary schools not speaking English. Accordingly, they drag down the overall standards for those without this socio-handicap. Still, the PC, pseudo-liberals insist that the public schools take on this draining task to the detriment of school spending in general.

.....but the 'education problem' in the U.S. is often more general: There are too many distractions available, e.g., cellular telephone, iPODs, television, cable television, DVDs, television,e-mail, instant messaging, Internet narcissism, et al. A focus on knowledge has to compete with somebody's notion of 'socialization.'
University education is view as merely the gateway to a sinecure....

[realitytrumpsbull]

I suggest 'roboteach'. Take ye windows-based
PC, strip all the excess junk out of the OS,
make it a no-nonsense performance hot-rod,
and fill it with ejubimnikanshinul goodies,
typing program, history lesson, math tutor,
english tutor, all those cool things you
see in the bargain bin over at Office Depot,
make it a lean, mean, teaching machine,
and develop a digitally-based national
curriculum. Kids like to play on computers?
Great. Capitalize on it. Call it the 'no excuses' education program, CD's are only
what, 20 cents each, if that, well, start
burning them and sending them out to schools
across the 50 states. If a kid is having trouble
or can't make it to school, march em down
to Goodwill and buy em a second-hand PC, give
em the discs, and have the whole thing tie in
with a special ed K-12 teacher online or something. There are very few problems that cannot be solved by a proper application of willpower, teamwork, technology, and
resources...educational deficiencies cannot
be permitted to be converted into a neverending
jobs program...

[1differentdrummer]

Wow, we have some real experts posting here, but some folks have a lot to be modest about. The problem goes back more than thirty years, it's fifty years old at least and undoubtedly much older in the North. It's about several things, in my experience: race, poverty, class size, mission, skills, materials, school district will, community will, fairness.
What's in it for a graduate? A job? That's what college prep does. What does the school do to prepare him/her for a job? What does the community do to grow the job market?
I saw a three-track disciplinary system in two MI high schools. Black kids were abused in the system and poor whites were treated only a little better. Middle class white kids had a cake walk.
A group of us teachers were assigned to small classes of likely dropouts. We taught using low-tech materials like Hooked on Books and SRA Reading Labs, counseled, did social work, were the kids' advocates with against system unfairness, helped them to improve skills, got them co-op type supervised jobs and required them to meet the same standards as the rest of the school and attend punctually. We accepted kids without knowing race so we had a mixture. We graduated over 80%, one year 88%, while other kids graduated at a rate of about 70%.
The school district, lacking will and a sense of mission canceled the program.
Unless you've done it you may not really have a good grasp of the problem or the size of the job. It's doable.

[Kansas Evans]

Great comment. When things like what you describe happens, it makes one wonder if the "system" really wants EVERYone to succeed.

[ElkoJohn]

I worked in the public education system (I now teach GED in the prisons), and the PES is set up for the middle of the bell shaped curve. You will never change that. I know of awesome teachers who would quit the public schools and successfully teach 10 or 15 "high risk" students if we had a voucher system to fund independent teachers. So those who object to the voucher system because it will hurt the public schools are advocating for the mainstream students, not the high risk students.

[CHARLESTHETENTH]

It is not social injustice or discrimination that is responsible for the school dropout rate being so high but the lack of family stability among the poor minority. Look at the numbers of single parents raising children today... look at the gangs that children embrace as a substitute for family. We are always quick to blame discrimination and lack of opportunity but it is and has always been family values and family stability that remains the foundation and sets an example for many children who grow into parenthood. Without it, as we now see, it becomes an vicious cycle within our current society with predictable poor results.

[ADVOCATE4ZPG]

Charles points to the core of it, and yet this 'society' blanches at the suggestion that SOME people should not a child--much less a series of offspring.

Nor should the U. S. grant automatic citizenship to the all-too-numerous offspring of ILLEGAL ALIENS!

Put a coin-box on televisions and DISCREDIT rap music....!

[Mormondude]

"* A personal, one-on-one relationship with a caring adult
* A safe place to learn and grow
* A healthy start and a healthy future"

This is all related to families, or the lack thereof.

Personally, I think it would be better to put all the kids that fall into this category into a 'community' school together. Why try to force them into a 'regular' school?

We already know that unfortunate kids like these gravitate together, and often end up in gangs. The preppy suburban white kids aren't in those gangs, so why try to shove the two groups into a school together?

Not every child needs a role model. Not every child needs a family at school. I think we need to tailor the education experience to the student, rather than force every student into a community based school.

I'm all for giving these kids a second or third chance, and I'm all for changing the learning environment in any way that works, but there is no need to force kids that are already succeeding in the current learning environment to change.

[ProgressivePal]

Very well put. And a great cause.

Another trend worth watching: whether the roll-back of special education services now being done in the name of "inclusion," without true supports and with ever-tightening testing and graduation requirements, will lead to a large spike in the number of special needs students dropping out of high school. That includes children with a learning disorder like dyslexia.

My prediction is their drop-out rate will only go up, since the current NCLB testing obsession is neglecting, at best, and penalizing, at worst, the kids who learn differently. If there's no hope of a diploma or individualized learning, too many special needs kids may just give up and drop out.

The goal should be to help all kids reach their potential, whatever that might be.

Thanks for the good work.

[cynara]

Thats a shame to hear. I spent my entire educatio in an extemely poor school district. About 40% of the students were in special ed. Some were trully mentally challenged, but alot were just situationally challenged, they had no support at home and were overlooked in a large public school class. In special ed, there were enough teachers aids to make sure that all those students got the individual help they needed on their homework from all classes. It made a difference.

I have heard since then, that home economics, drama, and shop classes have also been eliminated. Which is a shame, since these classes were often the only reason that teenagers who weren't excelling in academic classes had the motivation to continue coming to school. Not everyone is going to be college bound, and these classes gave those students that weren't academic standouts a chance to be a standout in another skill, be it auto mechanics, welding, sewing, cooking, etc... all skills which can open doors to jobs in the "real" world.

I have often heard people say that educational problems can't be solved by just throwing money at the situation, but all of these classes and programs mentioned above have been eliminated due to budget cuts.. A few more bucks to hire additional teachers for additional programs could go a long way in curbing dropout rates.

[shawshank]

Thanks. Only if more people will realize that the solution to all ills is not more funding for cops and their so-called crime prevention.

[Trevor51181]

I agree. Thanks for your work and may you be able to keep it up.

[Kansas Evans]

You got it, my friend.