By homeschooling his children, Paul Cotton is taking control of the educational -- and ultimately, social and economic -- destinies of his children, making their lives better. Not every parent can -- or even should -- homeschool. But every parent, including black parents, can be more pushy and active in charting the educational course of the lives of their children. Do it. (Photo courtesy of the Houston Chronicle.)

Commentary and thinking inside all around the dropout nation (updates and new stories marked with an *):

• Homeschooling: Not just for Fundamentalist Christians anymore: Although the number of black families engaged in homeschooling is still a smidgen of the overall population — a mere 220,000, according to the National Home Education Research Institute (and more likely, a little less than that, if one looks at the 1999 National Center for Educational Statistics data), it has become a choice for middle-class families not too cool with how public schools treat racial minorities, according to the Houston Chronicle. If so, this marks another sea-change in how groups that have been traditionally allied with traditional public education are viewing the status quo.
• Parental engagement? We need more of it!: And they need to be pushy about it to boot, declares Lord Adonis, Britain’s education minister. If the nation is going to get rid of the most substandard of its public schools, it will be up to parents to eschew those places and head toward with better academic performance. For months, the rival of –and likely successor to — Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Conservative Party leader David Cameron, has been arguing that line. Now, imagine U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings saying the same thing. Can’t. Proves my point: It will take more federal and state school officials embracing more active parental involvement before parents will dare get themselves entangled in battles with teachers and administrators over the direction of the schools to which parents send their kids.
• Speaking of substandard: The Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston may join Dallas Independent schools in watering down standards; this time, the school board appointed a committee looking into limiting the amount of homework given to students, reports the Houston Chronicle. Why? The poor children are being stressed out. Actually, it’s the suburban parents of the district who are stressed out by actually having to be parents. Again, like the battle against standardized testing, which has suburbanites allied with teachers’ unions and suburban school districts against urban districts and school reformers on both the left and right, this is another lifestyle argument that has little to do with actually dealing with the reality that suburban school districts are often doing no better in elevating the academic performance of the children in their care than urban counterparts.
• Attempting to keep them in school: Fifty percent of students in Muskegon High School in Michigan drop out, thus making the school a major dropout factory outside of Detroit. So the school district is looking at ways to stem the tide, according to the Muskegon Chronicle. One move: Hire specialists such as Chandar Ricks to focus on getting kids back in school and keeping the at-risk students inside. This is an approach that has been taken by districts such as Indianapolis Public Schools earlier in the decade, with smattering of success. And although it is a good move on the district’s part to do this, it must also look at the long-term curriculum and instruction issues that are among the underlying causes of students leaving before they graduate high school.
• A new relationship with teachers’ unions: Ever since the Progressive Policy Institute’s school reform efforts in the 1990s (then led by Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham), centrist Democrats and a new generation of black leaders in the party have viewed the arguments made by teachers unions more skeptically than the rest of the base. Now that big-city mayors such as Chicago’s Richard Daley and Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., are taking control of traditional public school districts, the unions are getting even less sympathy. This, along with the development of groups such as Joe Williams’ Democrats For Education Reform and primary victories by its supporters — including Denver’s Jared Polis — is making things less comfortable for the AFT and NEA. Mickey Kaus finally realizes this while in Denver during coverage of a Democratic convention shindig. (Hat tip to Joanne Jacobs).

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.

Helpling with homework and attending the PTA is no longer the only part parents must play in their children's academic lives. They must also help in shaping their curricula -- and must have the tools and support to do so. (Photo courtesy of needsfoundation.org)

If it’s happening in the dropout nation, you can find it here. Updated continuously throughout the day (asterisks are next to new and updated items):

• Getting only half the story: Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is clearly no fan of the school voucher program being proposed by Georgia State Sen. Eric Johnson. Why? From his perspective… Actually, make that after talking to “teachers and administrators,” Bookman concludes that the single most important solution to student academic failure is parental involvement. And vouchers won’t, from his perspective, won’t help children with “uninvolved parents.” Bookman, however, should actually spend time with parents — both poor and middle-class — who are extraordinarily involved in shaping the academic careers of their students, who have found working with school bureaucrats and teachers to be, at times, rather unpleasant.
  
• One of the issues not addressed by most education commentators is the reality that the school experience — that is, dealing with administrators and teachers who, due to gaining a number of graduate degrees  in education (whatever their value in terms of improving instructional training and subject-matter competency) can be, at best, intimidating. And from my own experiences with some teachers, there are a fair share of teachers out there who are just plain arrogant. If pu
• This isn’t to say that there aren’t parents who just simply ignore their children’s educational — and ultimately, economic and social destiny. Nor is to say that civic society must play a strong role in helping poor parents (and even middle-class ones) make good school choices — a major issue in school choice that my fellow libertarians often fail to address — by creating advisory centers and parent education clinics. Nor can one say that private schools can, in the main, always do a better job of educating students than public schools; given that traditional public, public charter and private schools pull from the same schools of education — many of which are woefully inept in preparing teachers for real-world instruction – students in all three sectors may be getting shortchanged. But parents should have the right to shape their children’s academic destinies — and get the opportunities to do so. More than ever, this nation’s dropout crisis requires parents to play strong, active (and untraditional; no mere PTA participation and field trip malarkey) in guiding their children into productive adulthood.
• An example of the struggles* faced by parents — especially poor ones — who want to improve the academic careers of their children can be found today in the AJC in a guest column by Lydia Glaize. Read on.
  
• Perhaps you shouldn’t have gone to MIT — or Harvard: Charles Murray joins the ‘college doesn’t matter’ crowd in his latest piece in the Wall Street Journal. I can understand the argument Murray is making. But I would argue that all high school students need to attend some form of higher education — be it academic, technical or otherwise — immediately after they graduate high school (whether they need to finish is a different story). And given the demands of the knowledge-based economy, they will need to develop their own plans for lifetime learning once they get into the workforce. More importantly, as Kevin Carey might ask, can Murray — a renown author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute — ever say he regrets going to college?
  
• Two-thirds lost: Village Voice legend Nat Hentoff takes a thoughtful look at one of the most stubborn problems facing New York schools chief Joel Klein: Reversing one of the nation’s worst graduation rates for black males. And unlike another New York icon (yes, you, Sol Stern), he actually takes a more balanced view of Klein’s successes and challenges.
• Meanwhile: The new graduation rate for the Big Apple is released, along with state numbers. If you believe the state numbers, 56 percent of the city’s graduating Class of 2007 garnered sheepskins.
• And you can find another version of my piece on H-1B visas and school teachers at EducationNews.org.
• Broader ain’t bolder. Or in Boulder*: Ken DeRosa and Jay Greene each give critique Broader, Bolder Coalition supporter (and UFT bigwig) Leo Casey’s defense of the anti-No Child Left Behind Act’s agenda. Your editor’s take: Although I will agree that there are numerous social issues that need to be dealt with, either through a civic society approach or a better attuning of the welfare state, schools really can’t fully address or mitigate those issues. They can, however, strengthen standards and curricula, improve their inadequate data systems, embrace more rigorous, information-driven instructional methods, recruit more effective teachers and spend more school time on instruction — none of which is done adequately now. Most importantly of all, they can elevate the expectations they have for all children, instead of the patronizing and shameful educational treatment of poor children embraced by Broader, Bolder. ‘We can’t educate these screwed-up children’ isn’t a mantra — or formula — for success.
  

Or should she?

Should he be ignored by his teacher?

Although one can appreciate Mike Petrilli’s argument that school systems should focus more on developing strong systems of academic instruction over finding talented aspiring collegians to teach (I’ll explain more of this tomorrow, with the help of The American Spectator), the reality is that the quality of instructor matters as much as the quality of instruction.

As pointed out so often by teaching guru Martin Haberman, it is important for a teacher to care about the children in his care as it is for that teacher to have strong instructional skills and subject-matter competency. All the instructional systems won’t matter if the teacher doesn’t know his subject and doesn’t care as much about the children lagging behind — either because the student’s learning style doesn’t

match the teacher’s instructional style or because of poor academic instruction before he reached that particular classroom — as for those landing on the student honor roll.

Exemplifying this reality is the poor advice given to teachers by Huston over at Gently Hew Stone, who tells teachers to not bother thinking about improving the performance of the laggards in their classroom. From where he sits, Huston thinks that “we can’t afford to dwell on those who choose to fail.”

And this teacher is absolutely wrong.

The teacher should especially care about the laggards — most notably the ones that are dramatically failing class — because they are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine: They alert teachers to the other students that are lagging behind, but aren’t given much attention because they aren’t misbehaving or they are barely skating by with Cs and Ds. Given the reality that a quarter of America’s students are failing to graduate from school — and that a large portion of those who do graduate will need remedial math and science once they reach college — the need to pay attention to every early warning indicator is crucial to keeping kids in school and on path to graduation.

The failure isn’t always the fault of the instruction given by the particular teacher (although, along with weak curriculum, is often part of the problem). The kids may need different kinds of instructional methods — and instructors — in order to get back on track. Or may need to be held back and given new settings in order to improve their performance. The kids may be struggling with Dyslexia or another learning disability and therefore, needs a new academic setting. Or the kids may come in from atrocious schools and are struggling in better-performing settings. And if the problem lies with the teacher’s instruction, then he — along with the principal — can take the steps needed to improve his methods or core subject knowledge.

What is needed — and the improvement for which Huston and Petrilli or should advocate — is expanding the amount of individual student data available to teachers. This can help them — and administrators — tailor instruction and lessons for each student. As I have discovered as part of another project on which I am working, school data systems often don’t extend beyond the central offices of school districts; even when schools are connected to the systems, access to information is limited to the clerical personnel and administrators charged with data processing work. As a result, teachers at the elementary level know little about their students save for the information they gather during the time the student is with them and the gossip shared with them in the faculty lounge. States should follow the path of Florida, which is now attempting to allow each teacher to access individual student data as part of the expansion of its school data system.

Collaboration at the middle- and secondary-school level is also key. A student’s academic problems are often not limited to one subject or teacher. Schools are attempting to do more of this, but it will take time to become a wide-spread — and well-done — practice.

Either way, a teacher should pay attention to those falling behind. Because it is a sign of deeper problems among the student body that aren’t always manifested in flunking out.

(Photos courtesy of Adobe Systems)

It shouldn't take a cop to bring a kid back into school. We must all do our part to keep the kids in their seats and ready to learn.

Thinking — and writing — about the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day:

1. Figuring out ways to keep them in school: Or at least that is the plan for school districts in Montgomery, Ala., Skokie, Illinois, and California’s San Bernardino County. All the plans, however, seem like rehashes of earlier regimes of bringing in police officers to ticket students and charging parents with failure to send their children to school. Not to say it doesn’t have some value. But the plans really should address the lack of academic rigor, the achievement gap issues and the other underlying factors that result in chronic truancy and eventually, leaving school without a sheepskin.
2. How about raising expectations for special ed students: That’s the argument made by Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute in his San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, in which he criticizes the Golden Gate City’s school officials for opposing a state requirement — dictated by the No Child Left Behind Act — that those students must take the state’s high school exit exam. Given that the test only quizzes students on 8th-grade math and need only to get 55-to-60 percent of the answers correct, all but the most developmentally-disabled special ed students can pass it with some extra tutoring and help from their teachers and schools. Given that 28 percent of special ed students eventually dropped out during the 2004-05 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, wouldn’t it make sense to figure out a way to keep those students in school?
3. A GI Bill for K-12 students? That’s what David Kirkpatrick suggests in his latest column at EducationNews.org. And he notes that not only did the original GI Bill plan work, it didn’t bring additional federal regulations as opponents of the idea feared at the time. Perhaps it is time to create a federal voucher program and expand the level of federal funding to public charter schools.
4. Are you kidding me? The College Board — the folks, along with Educational Testing Services, behind the Scholastic Aptitude Test — will roll out a version of the PSAT in 2010 designed to test 8th-graders and get them into college prep programs early. L.A. Unified may actually offer the new PSAT to all 8th-graders once it’s unveiled. That’s great news, especially for talented young black males and females, both nationwide and in the City of Angels, who often get shunted aside from such programs despite their high intelligence. But a few folks, according to the Los Angeles Times, think the tests should be given far earlier in 6th grade. They may be right, but 8th-grade testing is a start.
5. Sometimes, Sol Stern needs to put down his pen: Kevin Carey gives the education policy legend the business for misusing the phrase “Lake Woebegon Effect” in his piece on New York’s math scores. My big issue with Stern on this one is more of the put-up-or-shut-up variety: He doesn’t offer any evidence of whether the students are progressing over time, simply comparing scores of whole grades of students — in this case, grade 3-through-8 — instead of, say doing a value-added time series in which he compares 5th grade student scores to their scores as 8th graders three years later. This method would likely give a better picture of how much of the test score improvement relates to the lowering of standards, natural cognitive growth as students or more effective instruction.
6. Think before you speak?: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a state education department official to task for declaring in a deposition that a school curriculum without a science component is an “adequate education.”
7. What do Cheech and Chong and Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers have in common: According to Matthew Ladner, both are, umm, up in smoke.

Check out this map, originally in the original Unfilled Promise report co-authored by Johns Hopkins researchers Robert Balfanz and Ruth Curran Neild — part of their long-term research on developing early indicators of potential dropouts. Then consider how we can address these issues block by city block, no matter where you live.

A young black man with textbooks. Now, this is what we should all see. Photo courtesy of blacksgiveback.blogspot.com

The dropout nation at a glance. Updated throughout the day:

1. What shall be done with No Child Left Behind: Some such as Checker Finn of Fordham are arguiing for a major re-write of the law while Diane Ravitch — she of the Broader, Bolder Coalition — think it should probably be dumped altogether. Meanwhile Sol Stern argues that, instead of re-writing the law outright, it should essentially be strengthened to show which states are gaming the system by lowering standards. Feel free to read more of the debate at Newtalk.org.
2. Editor’s note: Ryan Hill of TEAM Schools argues that the gaming of the system by states exemplifies the need for national standards. I would generally agree. Except for this: If the federal government is already struggling to get all 50 states to comply with No Child’s goals — and that’s with a wide array of exemptions and allowances for missed deadlines thusfar — why would anyone think that it can go so far and actually enforce curriculum standards? And as we have seen in debates over phonics versus whole language and Reading First, a growing federal role will only mean additional battling over whose standards are best — leading to a set of curriculum rules that are as mushy as many of the standards at the state level.
3. It’s never about the teachers: At least that is the perspective of the piece written by California Federation of Teachers President Marty Hittelman, who mentions that California is among the last in school spending per student (even though California is also, by the way, the nation’s largest state and spends $40 billion annually on K-12) and argues that the allegedly low spending, along with the lack of librarians, are among the reasons why some 127,300 students in the state’s original Class of 2007  are failing to get their sheepskins. I must ask: What about, umm, high-quality instruction by high-quality teachers? Which may be obtained if the state’s rules governing teacher evaluations allowed for more stringent analysis of teacher competency.
4. Meanwhile the Golden State’s school superintendent, Jack O’Connell advocates for using data in solving the state’s dropout crisis. It would help if his department had a better relationship with the most powerful congressperson on education — California Congressman George Miller.
5. Not acceptable at any level: So says the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette about the spate of bad news about Indiana’s — and Indianapolis’ — low graduation rates.

1. Surprise, surprise: Poor black and other minority students in Texas are less likely to get highly-qualified teachers than students of all races in wealthier parts of the state, reports Gary Scharrar of the Houston Chronicle.
2. Spend, spend, spend: The Wall Street Journal looks at spending by the national operations of the NEA and AFT. Given that teachers generally don’t have much choice but to join the unions — either on their own or agency fees that they pay even if they aren’t members — it is important to think about how the NEA and AFT spends the money of its rank-and-file. Especially — and more importantly — as the state and local affiliates lobby state legislators and policymakers for more favorable governance rules.
3. Mike Antonucci has his own thoughts.
4. Liam Julian on Affirmative Action: “Affirmative action hasn’t just somehow changed, somehow morphed, into a policy by which privileged whites can expiate past wrongs and rid themselves of guilt… These are what affirmative action has, in fact, always been about.” Credit Kevin Carey for this discussion.
5. Is education devalued by rhetoric: So asks Mike Petrilli at Flypaper in a discussion about why education doesn’t always grab the attention of the average voter as other issues do. From where I sit, the problem lies in the reality that education is one of the few government goods everyone uses and therefore, each person thinks their experience is the norm. Suburban students who graduate from school, make it to college and succeed in the workforce, therefore, have difficulty understanding why their counterparts in urban schools don’t do so. Or why their parents keep them in those schools in the first place. Thus adding to the difficulty of selling the value of concepts such as vouchers and charters schools to suburbanites. And proving the point that people only know what they see and don’t care about what they don’t.
6. Of course, it doesn’t help that some people think schools aren’t the problem: Just read the declaration of the Broader, Bolder Coalition, which proclaims that poor-performing schools aren’t the problem. Then read this polemic by Michael Holzman of the Schott Foundation for Public Education — who just oversaw the release of its latest annual report on low graduation rates for young black men — in which he declares that such schools are the problem. One of these folks knows better. The others, well, ignore most of the problem, thus weakening their argument altogether.
7. Speaking of Schott: Joanne Jacobs offers some thoughts on the report, while commenters offer their own explanations for the academic woes of black males.
8. In charts: Ken DeRosa explains the correlations between school spending and academic performance.
9. Suburbia and School Reform, Part MMM: Chicago Public Radio takes a look at one effort to start a charter school in a suburban community — and why the effort is not taking hold. Until suburban parents recognize that their schools are often no better than some average-performing urban high schools, they will not embrace reform.
10. Self-promotion, as always: The real reason why so many Americans aren’t reaping the benefits of free trade and globalization can be seen not in NAFTA, but in L.A.’s Hollywood High School and other schools in which academic failure has become the norm. Check it out today at The American Spectator.