One of the aspects of the education crisis that gets little discussion from reformers and education traditionalists alike is the yawning achievement gaps between young men and their female counterparts. No matter the racial, ethnic or economic background, far more young men fall behind in school and never catch up. One-fifth of young white male 12th-graders from college-educated households read Below Basic on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress versus just one out of every ten of their female counterparts, while the percentage of black male high school seniors mired at levels of functional illiteracy is 14 percentage points higher than for their female schoolmates. The low levels of achievement explain why women earn 62% of all two-year degrees, attain 57% of all four-year degrees, and young men are absent on nearly all college campuses.

Given the woeful statistics and the reality that young men make up three out of every five high school dropouts, it is critical to focus on their achievement gaps in order to stem the nation’s education crisis. And yet, for the past decade, it has been of little concern at the federal level. The No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions didn’t require gender as one of the subgroups for holding schools accountable for performance. And now, the plan for reauthorizing No Child proposed by Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin and Mike Enzi will do even less in tracking how schools are poorly-serving young men of all backgrounds.

As you already know, the Harkin-Enzi plan would scrap AYP altogether, allowing for all but the worst 5,000 failure factories and another five percent of the nation’s schools with wide racial- and economic achievement gaps to escape scrutiny. The rest of the nation’s schools would only be responsible for “continuous improvement” in each subgroup including gender. But continuous improvement under Harkin-Enzi is vague; it doesn’t even require schools to at least improve grade performance of each cohort by as much as two grade levels.  So most schools, especially suburban districts whose performance have been revealed to be mediocre under AYP and independent studies by outfits such as the George W. Bush Institute’s Global Report Card, will avoid improving curricula and instruction for the young black, white, Latino and even Asian men in those schools — especially those from college-educated homes. So the boys, along with poor and minority kids who have long been neglected throughout American public education, get the proverbial short stick.

Under Harkin-Enzi, failure mills and schools with wide achievement gaps will still be subjected under some kind of an AYP mechanism. But the plan still ignores the young men’s crisis because it doesn’t require states and school districts to address the activities that have long perpetuated these achievement gaps — including the overdiagnosis of learning disabilities and the overuse of suspension and expulsion in school discipline. Adding gender as an accountability category is one for which Why Boys Fail’s Richard Whitmire and I argued four months ago in our column for USA Today. While one can argue that school reformers can push to address those matters through the use of litigation (specifically under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act), doing so wouldn’t work to force systemic reform en masse.

This silence on the boys crisis isn’t limited to Harkin-Enzi alone. The even less useful No Child revamp proposed by Enzi’s Republican colleague, Lamar Alexander, is also silent on this matter; the waiver plan being pushed by President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan allows for states to subject their schools to accountability for the low performance of young men, but it doesn’t force them to do so. None of these plans for revamping No Child will comprehensively advance the reform of American public education.

Let’s be clear about this: When men don’t graduate from high school and move on to college, they will fall into poverty and unemployment. They are more likely to end up in prison, unlikely to be the kind of men well-educated women want to marry, and are cannot be the kind of fathers and husbands society needs for preserving communities and families — especially in the age of the knowledge-based economy and the decline of traditional manual labor. Ignoring this important aspect of the nation’s education crisis is perilous for millions of young men who need (and deserve) the kind of high-quality teaching and college-preparatory curricula that will allow them to write their own stories. More importantly, by not addressing these problems and their underlying causes, we will not succeed in building cultures of genius that nurture the potential of all of our students.

This reality is also another reason why the argument against focusing on achievement gaps advocated by American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess doesn’t make sense. When we improve instruction and curricula for our students who have been the most ill-served by traditional public schools — including for young black, white, Latino and Asian men — we are improving education for all children. By addressing achievement gaps, we are also tackling the underlying problems that have made the nation’s education crisis a threat to our immediate- and long-term economic well-being. When we address the low graduation rates and underlying literacy issues facing young men of all socioeconomic backgrounds, we are also helping high-performing young women of all races and economic backgrounds succeed. And when we provide strong reading remediation to young men in the early grades, we also keep more kids out of the educational ghetto that is special ed — and put more kids on the path to higher education of all forms.

Senators Harkin and Enzi need to pull this No Child revamp and come up with a better plan. Such a plan would ultimately challenge states and districts to engage in reforms that will help young men — and all children — succeed in school and in life.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I turn more attention to the impact of the nation’s education crisis on the futures of young men. We need to continue overhauling American public education and provide strong role models in order for keep our boys on the path to graduation and economic success.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Reading is fundamental. When children don’t read at basic or proficient levels by third grade, they are unlikely to graduate or succeed in life. This is especially true for young men, who develop their capacity for reading just as they enter school. So for parents, it is important to read to your kids. At the same time, it is also critical to make sure that the school your child attends is also on the job, especially since 40 percent of all kids will need special reading instruction no matter what you do at home.

Dropout Nation offers six key things to look for in your school’s reading instruction. Also, listen to Dropout Nation Podcasts on how to improve reading for your kids and the youngsters around them, and learn what teachers should be doing in classrooms when it comes to reading instruction. Read, pay attention to what teachers are doing, and take action if you don’t think they are doing the job.

1. A focus on phonetic awareness: Your child should be learning the ability to manipulate sounds in words, an integral part of decoding what it read.
2. Emphasis on phonics: Teachers should be teaching your child the relationship between written letters and sounds. If this doesn’t happen, your child will not be able to read.
3. Building background knowledge: This is as critical as phonics because your child needs to know about the world around him — including history, social studies, even science — in order to build strong reading comprehension — or the ability to gain meaning while reading. The school should have a strong, rich curricula for each grade — and every teacher should be able to tell you what your child should learn (and what the school or district expects you to learn) in the grade your child is in. If not, begin advocating for the adoption of more-rigorous curricula or find them another school.
4. Gain a vast vocabulary: Each day, your school should be doing what you do at home: Teaching your child words, their definitions and the context in which they should be used. Preferably, the teacher should teach your child at least five new words a week (if not more). Again, if it isn’t happening, start making it happen — even if you have to do it yourself.
5. Get your child to read faster and pick up information more quickly: Sure, every child reads at different speeds. At the same time, there is a point where your child should be able to read aloud a text designated for their grade without a lot of stumbling (a first-grader should be able to read 60 words per minute). The teacher should have your child read constantly, repeatedly, sometimes working on the same passage, until they get up to speed. If this isn’t happening, take action.
6. And it all should lead to strong reading comprehension: This doesn’t just mean being able to just pronounce words correctly and being able to speed through a book. They should be able to tell you or their teacher what is being discussed in a book or paragraph. Again, if this isn’t happening, you need to take action, both in school and at home.

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Yesterday’s Dropout Nation commentary on Pedro Noguera’s opposition to shutting down dropout factoreis garnered a wide array of responses. One in particular comes from Noguera himself. Below is his response, uncorrected and unedited.

Read my work before you ask silly questions.  I have been working to reform urban schools for over 20 years.  I don’t make excuses for failure and I don’t think that shutting down failing schools is  solution.  According to Duncan there are over 5,000 dropout factories across the US.  If you shut them down where will these students go to school?  You should think before repeatsing simplistic ideas.

Apparently those with whom Noguera disagrees can’t possibly have an original thought of their own. Considering all the reporting and commentary Dropout Nation has done over the past few years arguing for  systemically dealing with the complexities of reforming American public education — and that there is no one answer to the nation’s educational crisis — all I can say is that Noguera should also read before making silly responses.

Second: Let’s remember that Noguera mentions that there are 5,000 dropout factories out of 98,916 schools in the entire country (a data point Duncan got from one of the leading thinkers on the dropout crisis, Robert Balfanz). For those who are keeping score, that’s five percent of all schools in the nation. One could easily argue that those 5,000 dropout factories can be replaced rather easily with 5,000 schools with higher-quality instruction, curricula, leadership and learning cultures. It can actually be done and it is being done in New York City through the development of charters and higher-quality traditional district schools. This is what other organizations with whom Noguera disagrees is also demanding. This won’t be easy to do, and again, we still need to systemically reform how we recruit, train and pay teachers, overhaul curricula, create cultures in which everyone is held to high expectations of success, and offer parents the ability to be lead decision-makers in education. But it can be done.

Finally: There are implications to one’s thinking and logical conclusions from them. Noguera may not “make excuses for failures”. But in his work, he has never dealt realistically with teacher quality or curriculum quality issues. If Noguera suggested that there needs to be an end to tenure, more-rigorous evaluation of teacher and principal performance, or any of those things that actually deal with the full range of structural issues that help foster dropout factories, then one could see the point of his argument against shutting down dropout factories. But he hasn’t. He is opposed to using student data in evaluating teachers. He essentially opposes the No Child Left Behind Act, which actually advanced accountability in education. His solutions only nibble at the edges of the nation’s education crisis. Let’s be plain about this: Noguera means well. But his solutions won’t improve the quality of education for poor young black and Latino men without full and systemic reform.

Noguera doesn’t exactly deserve as thoughtful a response as I’ve given. He did not offer much of anything in the first place.

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There is no difference between a dropout factory and a prison. We need to keep our young black and Latino men out of both.

There is no reason to keep open a dropout factory or a failure mill. Not one at all. Every day a child is subjected to abysmal instruction, shoddy curricula, faulty school leadership and cultures of failure, that child loses opportunities for future success and the ability to write their own stories. As researchers such as Sitha Babu, William Sanders and others have shown, even a high-performing student will fall behind if they are taught by three consecutive low-performing teachers. Nor do the dropout factories improve over time. As seen in the case of Indianapolis’ Emmerich Manual High School (one of the schools profiled as part of the 2005 series I wrote detailing how inflated graduation rates hid the nation’s dropout crisis), the schools and their cultures remain as pervasive and abusive to students now as they were decades ago. As the Thomas B. Fordham Institute pointed out earlier this year, just 1 percent of low-performing schools it surveyed were dramatically turned around in five years.

Which is why New York University Professor Pedro Noguera’s claptrap in today’s New York Daily News a stunning example of fantasy over data and common sense. While declaring that “New York cannot wait any longer” to keep black and Latino males on the path towards graduation and success in life, Noguera goes off and argues that this requires keeping the Big Apple’s dropout factories and failure mills open for business. From where Noguera, shutting down dropout factories have done little for black and Latino students; instead what should be done is to keep the schools open and instead, use his favored interventions — including extending the school day, pre-k programs and mentoring operations.

Of course, Noguera fails to admit that New York City has actually done more than just shut down dropout factories, in fact, replacing the failure factories with new schools (traditional and charter) with more-rigorous school cultures. He also ignores some of the other systemic efforts that have been done — including improving teacher quality  He also ignores the results, including a five-year promoting power rate (based on eighth-grade enrollment) for black males that improved from 50 percent for the Class of 2004 to 66 percent for the Class of 2009, according to an analysis by Dropout Nation. This doesn’t mean New York City is doing great by any means; graduation and promoting power rates for the city are still in the pits, far too many black and Latinos males are suffering from educational neglect, and we need to move urgently. But there is progress and the approach taken by the city has worked better than the thumb-sucking that has gone in less reform-minded districts.

The bigger problem is that Noguera’s solution — keep dropout factories open and just apply some sort of his favored interventions — has never worked. It is a romantic Hollywood notion, a stock feature of films such as Lean on Me, that makes defenders of the status quo feel real good inside; But such notions do little for actual children, including young black and Latino men who suffer the academic neglect and malpractice these adults perpetuate and support from kindergarten on. Just 11 percent of California elementary schools forced by state officials to undergo turnarounds made “exemplary progress” three years later, according to former Thomas B. Fordham scholar Andy Smarick; a mere nine percent of failing schools in Ohio put into restructuring improved student achievement one year later.

Why? Because turnarounds don’t hit upon the systemic and cultural problems within school districts and within American public education. Initiating mentoring programs will not overcome state laws that keep low-quality teachers in classrooms, nor can they substitute for using student test data in evaluating teacher performance. Adding prekindergarten classes will not help improve curriculum or address the problems of literacy that are one of main underlying causes of academic failure among young males of all races, ethnicities and classes. Adding more guidance counselors will do little to address the overdiagnosis of young men — especially blacks and Latinos — as special ed cases in the early grades.

This isn’t to say that Noguera’s suggestions aren’t worth pursuing. It’s that they must be pursued as part of systemic reforms that includes shutting failure factories and replacing them with cultures of genius — including high-quality charter and private schools. Far too many black and Latino men are forced into academic prisons that serve as gateways to Attica, Folsom and worse. Noguera shouldn’t argue for keeping then open. He should be demanding to shut them down.

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One of the underlying factors behind the nation’s education crisis is the low levels of reading comprehension among students. This is especially tru for young men of all racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Thanks to poor reading instruction, the lack of intensive reading remediation and abysmal curricula, young men fall behind and end up being overdiagnosed as special ed cases. The ultomate result: Academic failure. And yet the nation is just beginning to address this issue.

George Mason University professor William Brozo, one of the few studying this crisis, takes time in this video to explain some other factors behind low reading comprehension among young men. Watch, listen, consider and take action.

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