Series and Projects

Since 2005, RiShawn Biddle has reported and editorialized on the crisis in America’s public education system and the battles over its reform. Starting with Left behind: A Star Editorial Board series, Biddle has covered the overuse of suspensions and expulsions in school discipline, the battles over school choice and charter schools, efforts to bring rigor and accountability to school operations and curricula, and teacher quality.

You can read more of RiShawn Biddle’s work at The American Spectator and Labor Watch . He can be reached at rbiddle-at-dropoutnation.net

Here is a list of the series and reports chronicling the Dropout Nation:

Left behind: A Star Editorial Board series (2005)

1. Dropout factories: IPS high schools are among the nation’s worst in producing graduates.
2. ‘Educational genocide’: Males – especially black males – aren’t keeping up with the girls.
3. Early warning signs: IPS looks to smaller high schools to keep kids involved, but the damage often is done before then.
4. A heavy burden: Indianapolis and Indiana are paying a hefty price for failing to deal realistically with the dropout epidemic.
5. Lots of small steps leads to progress
6. Township black male dropout rates are unacceptably high
7. When the teachers are away, students suffer the consequences
8. The faces of dropouts
9. Nothing beats a regular diploma
10. An early exit from school: High rates of suspensions, expulsions plagues state
11. Not just an urban problem: Most dropouts are white, from small towns and suburbs

Juvenile injustice: Crisis at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center (2006)

1. Danger zone
2. Defenseless children
3. Who’s watching?
4. Tales from the juvenile injustice files
5. Why didn’t Samuel get his trial
6. The picture of guilt
7. Killing the seed before it grow