On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I examine the debate between congressional Democrats, President Barack Obama and centrist Democrat school reformers over the edujobs bill. The proposed $10 billion school bailout bill will do little to advance school reform or stem (ever-dwindling) teacher and school employee bailout numbers. Instead of another bailout, President Obama, outgoing House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey and his fellow congressional Democrats should focus on building parent power and making families true decision-makers in education.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

The argument over whether kids need high-quality curricula -- and higher education -- is redundant and moot in this day in age. Every child needs high-quality education. (Photo courtesy of Forbes)

A dominant debate in education reform is over whether or not students should have to take on high-quality, college-preparatory curricula or should be able to choose a vocational-oriented curricula that allows them to get jobs immediately. Defenders of the first group (including the Gates Foundation and Kevin Carey of the Education Sector) rightly point out that children need college prep curricula in order to avoid being part of the 50 percent or more of college freshmen who end up in remedial courses and thus never graduate. The other side (a motley crew that includes Charles Murray and defenders of traditional public education) argues that far too many kids are going to college anyway, that they are going for degrees in jobs that don’ t actually need higher levels of preparation, that the curricula is too challenging for most kids, and that they would be best apprenticing for positions.

This isn’t a new argument. In fact, it is as old as the debate over whether high schools should be college prep-oriented (as legendary Harvard University president Charles Eliot envisioned and successfully pushed in the late 19th century) or the comprehensive track-based system that has been predominant for the past 70 years. The racialist origins of the latter (that blacks and immigrants couldn’t succeed academically) notwithstanding, the argument remains active especially in the age of No Child Left Behind and modern school reform. For those who believe in vocational education — shop classes and the like — the emphasis on academic curricula to them is a bias against blue-collar work.

But a list compiled earlier this month by Forbes should put an end to this counterproductive argument. The evidence is clear: All kids need a high-quality curricula that prepares them for higher education of all kinds, be it college, vocational college or apprenticeships.

The list, America’s Best Paying Blue-Collar Jobs, notes that just about all the top-paying positions that don’t involve working at a desk require some form of higher education. An elevator repairman and installer, for example, must apprentice for four years before being ready to take on a complex job that involves aspects of mechanical engineering, structural engineering and electrical engineering. Another position, rotary drill operators in the oil industry, usually need to have an Associate’s degree in order to get through the door. Electrical and electronics installers — including those who work on power plants and substations — also need community college education and will spend a few years working alongside veterans to gain experience. The only job that doesn’t require such experience (in theory) are long-hall truck drivers; even then, many of them go to technical school to learn how to drive big rigs and buses (if they don’t already have such experience from working at Greyhound).

In essence, all of these positions require some sort of higher education — not in the 19th century sense of just the Ivy League campus, but in a much-older sense of apprenticeships, technical colleges and yes, traditional private and public universities. This shouldn’t be a surprise. As I’ve mentioned on this site, welders need higher-level math skills such as trigonometry just to qualify for apprenticeships within the automotive industry, and machine tool-die manufacturers are often experts in algebra, calculus and other mathematical subjects. Highly-skilled blue-collar professionals need high-level math skills — and the underlying reading skills that help young men and women learn how to master the underlying symbols and knowledge that girds all of mathematics — as much as their white-collar counterparts.

The coming generation faces even more complexity. Thanks to the Internet and the advancement of data systems in every sector, mastering statistics  is now critical for journalists, marketers and many other white-collar and blue-collar professionals. Plumbers — often cited by opponents of high-quality curricula as the ultimate high-pay no-skill job — requires technical education (and strong underlying K-12 education) in order to make it. Even auto repair work — once grease monkey work in the minds of previous generations — is now a knowledge-based sector thanks to the widespread use of computers in engines and other sections of cars.

What all children need is a high-quality curricula, no matter where they live or what school they attend, in order to choose their own path in a much-more expanded concept of higher education that includes traditional college, vocational school, community colleges and apprenticeships.  So do our communities, especially the poor urban communities that suffer as a result of the failures of dropout factories and the rest of traditional public education; they cannot be revived without a core group of middle-class white-collar and blue-collar professionals to lead the way. So does society: Plumbers should be able to easily cite Chaucer in polite conversation, if they so choose; after all, Western Culture cannot survive and thrive without highly-educated people at every level and professional rank. If we all truly believe in lifelong learning, eliminating all limitations on that is crucial to encouraging all children to become well-studied adults.

It is no longer a question of whether children need high-quality, higher ed-driven curricula or not. It is a question of whether they will get it before we all pay the price. Or in short, the Kevin Careys and the Charles Murrays just need to stop arguing and get to work.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive approaches to improving equity and equality for the nation’s poor black and Latino children and embrace approaches offered by the school reform movement.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

Update: You can now download the Podcast from Zune Marketplace.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has long been renowned for its academic failure and bureaucratic intransigence. But, as I report today in National Review, the dysfunctional district is now looking to bring school choice of a sort to the district. Read more and check out the special gallery with statistics on the district’s academic and bureaucratic troubles.

Special education is the place where graduation doesn’t happen. Less than one-fifth of students ever graduate. Seventy-three percent of students with learning disabilities or emotional disturbances will end up being arrested and incarcerated over time. Yet despite evidence that overdiagnosis of learning disabilities is leading to more labeling of students, especially black and white males, there is ample fiscal incentive for school districts to engage in the gamesmanship.

A look at Atlanta’s public school district offers some clues as to what is happening to far too many young men and women, especially black and poor whites:

2,181: Number of special ed students in Atlanta’s public schools in 2005-2006, as funded by the Georgia state government. This doesn’t include kindergartners or elementary school students who are special ed, but are served under the state’s program for early intervention. About 3,035 students in Atlanta schools are diagnosed with a learning disability.

$7,550: The amount given for each special ed student by the State of Georgia. The state just provides $2,181 for each student in regular academic programs and $2,705 for every student in gifted and talented programs.

49: Percentage of special education/learning disabled students who spend 60 percent or more of their time outside regular classes, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Essentially, they are not likely to participate in academic courses that lead to college and beyond.

1,515: Number of special ed students (all served under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or other federal laws) either suspended, expelled or subject to corporal punishment  in 2005-2006. The more often children are suspended, the less likely they are to graduate from school.

9: Percentage of black males labeled with a specific learning disability — and likely in special education classes; this is three times higher than the likely occurrence of such disabilities.  Three percent of black females are labeled.

4: Percentage of white males labeled with a specific learning disability. Just slightly above the likely occurrence of such disabilities. Only two percent of white females were labeled.

92: The percentage of the labeled learning-disabled enrollment who are black; blacks make up 86 percent of all student enrollment overall in Atlanta public schools. Whites account for three-hundredths of one percent of learning-disabled students, despite making up eight percent of overall enrollment.

42: The percentage of Atlanta’s gifted and talented program students who are white; that is eight times higher than their overall enrollment. Blacks do account for 53 percent of students in the gifted and talented program; but that is below their overall enrollment in the school district.

As head of the Black Star Project, Phillip Jackson is often fighting a lonely battle to keep America’s black children in school and out of prison and trouble. These days, in his hometown of Chicago, it has become even harder. The city where “diploma dreams go to die”, has also seen hundreds of young students die inside and out of its public schools. In this piece, Jackson offers his own solutions for stemming youth violence for the long run.

Youth violence is a national issue. Since we began the Iraq war in 2003, an estimated 32,000 American youths lost their lives to violence — far more than the 4,349 U.S. soldiers who died in battle. Yet the United States treats youth violence as a nuisance, not as a war it wants to win.

We cannot fix the problems of children or schools in America without first fixing the problems of the adults in their lives and of the communities in which the children live. Anything else is pretending to fix the problem and is a community disservice!

So far, the most popular approaches to address youth violence have not made any significant nor long-term impact. More police merely militarizes and destabilizes communities. The other offering that haven’t worked includes: Stiffer sentencing for young offenders; direct intervention at the point of impending violence; vigils, peace rallies and peace marches through communities;  and prayers without concrete, supportive actions.

Meanwhile there are effective approaches cited by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that have been shown to reduce youth violence over time and produce long-term, lasting, positive results. Build strong families and communities and employ good parents as the chief agents to reduce youth violence. Teach young children ways to resolve conflict peacefully. Provide mentors to serve as guides and role models for positive youth behavior. Reduce social and economic causes of violence in young people’s environments. And ensure spiritual or character-based training for young children and reinforce that training throughout their early teen years.

In Chicago, the youth, themselves, are asking for more mentors, more parent involvement in their lives and more job and economic opportunities. Their requests parallel CDC’s recommendations to reduce violence. But these requests – and the solutions – are ignored. While government attempts to study, analyze and understand youth violence, the Black Star Project is implementing workable solutions in Chicago — ground zero for the war against youth violence.

Each day, the Black Star Project has 250 male and female volunteers who mentor youth on school days.  Since 1996, the Black Star Project has provided classroom-based mentoring to nearly 200,000 Chicago-area students. We also have 100 Peace Walkers who patrolled high-risk neighborhoods in Chicago this summer; 70 Parent University professors who have taught thousands of parents to be great parents since 2004 and 25 college coaches who have helped prepare thousands of elementary school students for college.

Through our Million Father March 2009, we organized 625,000 fathers in 500 cities across America to take their children back to school on the first day. These are the kinds of “armies of hope” that the federal government needs to win this war.

If we continue to address this problem with the current lack of resolve, including misdirected, piece-meal efforts with too-few resources — just as we lost the war in Vietnam, then we are destined for a resounding defeat in the war against youth violence on the streets of America.

The effort to eliminate youth violence commands a national response that includes national resources, a national infrastructure and national leadership. This effort must be comprehensive and coordinated across foundation, government, faith-based and community-based organizational lines. Many organizations such as The Black Star Project are working to restore order in chaotic and violence-ridden neighborhoods.  Our efforts are essential to eliminate violence, restore hope and reduce the need for militarizing our many troubled communities.

Our war to save the minds and spirits of our children is the most important war that America will ever fight.  Saving our children is difficult because of the “No Snitching” code-of-silence among our American youth, which has proved devastating and unacceptable in this war.  Yet our government’s “No Support” policy for organizations that work for long-term solutions to fix this problem of youth violence in American communities is inexcusable.  In fact, “No Support” is far, far worse than “No Snitching,” and our children know it!

One dropout at a time. Cartoon courtesey of Lisa Benson

Are there too many teens attending America’s colleges? Marcus Winters says more of them need to attend. Robert VerBruggen, on the other hand, argues that since 25 percent of college grads are allegedly working in jobs that don’t require college degrees, the answer is no.

The reality is that the argument is much more complex than either of them let on.

While a good portion of college students are working in jobs other than the ones for which they aspired, it is likely as much a failure of them to understand that college is not just about the degree. As a son of one of my former bosses learned recently, college is also about networking, building the relationships that can translate into jobs and future opportunities. Even before the recent recession, there were plenty of journalism majors who never realized that you had to also work at a college newspaper, freelance prolifically, and gain internships in order to move into the professional ranks.

The bigger problem is that far too many students of all socioeconomic backgrounds are ill-prepared for college in the first place. This problem lies not so much with universities, but with the abysmal instruction inside America’s public education system. More than one-third of college freshmen and sophomores reported that they took at least one remedial reading or math class, according to a 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Education. It starts early with the social promotion of students who should be held back and given different teachers who can help them get up to speed. After elementary school, the additional preparation for college — in the form of Algebra 1 classes in the eighth grade and solid college-level reading courses in ninth grade — doesn’t come early enough.

And then there is the nature of the comprehensive model used in America’s public education system, in which students and their parents aren’t given the choice to give their children a college prep education in the first place. The fact that teachers and guidance counselors are the gatekeepers to these college prep courses means that many students not deemed college ready for subjective reasons never get the shot they need until high school — if at all.

The question isn’t whether or not there are too many kids attending high school. The real question is how to improve America’s public schools — and give them the kind of enriched education that gives children as many choices in life as possible. Sure, not every kid will attend college. But not every kid can also become a plumber. Besides, even a plumber should be literate enough to quote Chaucer — and aspiring welders need Trigonometry and Algebra in order to become apprentices.

These kids need to be back in school, not in truancy court. So let's help keep them there.

All there is to know in the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day (updates and new stories are *):

• No standard left behind: As large a role poor instruction plays in fueling the dropout crisis and the nation’s overall crisis of low academic achievement, another can be found in efforts by many school districts to essentially water down academic standards set at the state and federal levels. From social promotion of laggard students (when they should be left back and given different teachers and instructional settings that fit their learning styles) to grade inflation, school districts engage in the kind of, well, let’s call it fraud that would lead to prison sentences if it were consider criminal offenses. Essentially, the districts are arguing that they are improving academic performance when all they are really doing is providing children with a slipshod education. So the report by the Dallas Morning News that teachers are annoyed at such an attempt by officials in the city’s Independent School District is both wonderful and disheartening to hear. The former, because teachers are being serious about their job. The latter? Because the district is up to the old nasty tricks again.
• When math teachers aren’t being well-instructed to teach math: The National Council on Teacher Quality released a study earlier this year on the woefully inadequate math instruction training by almost all of the 77 schools of education it surveyed. Now George Leef of the Pope Center offers some pointers on how math instruction must be reformed in order to improve the poor math performance of America’s students.
• Speaking of math (and immigration and teachers and H-1B): At Free Trade Nation, your editor analyzes one immigration skeptic’s criticism of the “H-1B Education” piece that ran earlier this week in The American Spectator.
• Teacher pay reform on sight: Kevin Carey gives a full report on the battle between new D.C. schools chief, Michelle Rhee, and the lackluster district’s teachers union over a teacher pay reform plan. Rhee may actually be winning over the younger (and more performance-oriented) teachers. But, while Carey is more optimistic about the results, I would argue that being the head of a school district within the nation’s capital — with a bevy of Democrat congressmen and senators who collect donations from the two major teachers unions – is no easy task; succeeding in winning salary reform may lead to a Congressional edict that will end the plan altogether.
• Speaking of Carey: Alexander Russo takes a shot at him for arguing with the Broader, Bolder gang. Although I understand Russo’s complaint that so many ed policy types aren’t as willing to engage in the dirty work of reforming schools in order to improve the education of poor kids, I would argue that the fact that Broader, Bolder includes the ones who do doesn’t mean that they are on the right side.  The latter, after all, is arguing for letting schools off the hook for their rather sizeable role in perpetuating the nation’s dropout crisis.

These lockers should be filled by the kids who have dropped out. Let's find a way to bring them back.

What is happening inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day (new stories and updates marked by *):

• The revolving door: Some 1,352 freshmen in California’s San Bernardino school district dropped out of school at least once, according to WestEd in a study that included the district. Yet a third of those students returned to school at least once — even though a mere 77 of them would ever gain a diploma. Why? WestEd told the Press-Enterprise that the reasons were myriad. Some just returned in order to meet a condition of probation while others tried to avoid getting a General Educational Development certificate, which has less value for job seekers. And some wanted to bolster their chances of getting a job. One wonders what solutions can be extended to these returning dropouts so they can finally stay in school and get true diplomas.
• Race and a poorly-run school district: Houston’s North Forest school district is a mess. It’s high schools is rated as one of the worst in the Lone Star State; charges of test cheating has haunted its other high school (now shuttered) were alleged int the pages of the Dallas Morning News last year. Its special education program has been accused of misconduct by parents, according to another news investigation. And it’s insolvent. So what happens when state education officials move to remove the school board? The board members hires a civil rights attorney to keep them ensconced in their seats. And, of course, being a majority-black school district run by an all-black board, the board members and their friends in the state legislature (along with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee) are claiming the board is being removed due to racism. Fail children and then claim bigotry? How nice.
• More Broader, Bolder: Kevin Carey wishes that the anti-No Child Left Behind group — which includes dropout crisis skeptic Lawrence Mishel of the NEA-funded Economic Policy Institute — would actually explain their positions and why they hold them. Alexander Russo gets a response from Mishel to some questions about the position of Broader, Bolder on testing.