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).

Photo courtesy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal

You would expect high tech giants such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and the U.S. division of India’s tech support powerhouse, Infosys, to be among the biggest users of H-1B skilled-labor visas. The same holds true for universities such as Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan and Purdue — the world’s training ground for skilled workers and research-and-development.

But some of the largest users of H-1B visas aren’t tech firms or major research universities. Rather, these unlikely users are the nation’s public school systems. Thirteen hundred seventy-four H-1B visas were issued to public schools during the 2006-07 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security…

– Read more at The American Spectator. And yes, it’s shameless self-promotion.

Two dropout factories later, Dontike Miller is now studying for a GED. And it isn't a Good Enough Diploma. Photo courtesy of AP

What’s happening inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day:

1. Losing track of the black kids, Texas style*: Black students account for 15 percent of school enrollment in the state, yet account for a quarter of the 13,100 or so 7th-through12th grade students for which the state’s traditional and public charter schools could not account, according to a report from the Texas Education Agency. Some districts and schools can’t account for as much as 12 percent of their middle-and-high school students. Nancy Smith of the Data Quality Campaign, which advocates for improving school data systems, tells the Austin American-Statesman that the fact that its a little odd that blacks account for so many of the unaccounted student population; it appears to be less a systemic data problem than possibly a racial issue.  Jimmy Kilpatrick, the Texan who runs EducationNews.org, on the other hand isn’t surprised at all (and neither am I). Says Kilpatrick: “Just look around crack houses and the jails and you will find all the “lost” blacks. These kids dropped out by 4th grade and few cared!”
2. Wielding clout: As I’ve noted previously, teachers unions are well-placed to wield clout inside the nation’s 50 statehouses and at the local level. Not only do they have the bodies — through local affiliates and the teacher corps — to lobby legislators on behalf of their goals, there is also the warchests they build up thanks to dues collected from the rank-and-file. So it’s no surprise that the New York Public Interest Research Group finds that the New York State United Teachers — the largest affiliate of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — is spending $2.3 million on winning budget votes in local districts. Essentially, says NYPIRG’s Blair Horner to the Examiner, United Teachers is basically wielding its warchest the way one would use  “a Howitzer on a mosquito.”
3. Meanwhile the United Teachers is also spending $2.8 million on lobbying and campaign donations this year, according to NYPIRG. Only Verizon, the phone giant, spent more lobbying and backing politicians.
4. When a good premise goes bad: Former University of Kentucky Professor Martty Solomon asks a good question in his EducationNews piece: Why embark on reforms with no facts or research. But then, he delivers a mishmash of pseudohistory and rubbish: Bashing the No Child Left Behind Act for allegedly turning schools into “testing factories” even though, if anything, the tests are hardly high-stakes or even very difficult for those who are actually taught the curriculum. Before that, he takes shots at the concept of providing college-preparatory — rigorous, solid — curriculum to students, blaming the introduction of such high standards for the dropout crisis; this despite the fact that few students graduated from high school for most of this century, that graduation rates may have been low for decades and that high schools were originally developed as prep schools based on the concepts expoused by legendary Harvard University president Charles William Eliot. High schools only became comprehensive during the 20th Century, when educators — driven in part by the belief that immigrant children and blacks were incapable of receiving a college prep education, pushed for a diversity of choices (including shop classes) so that kids would stay in school, if not receive a high-quality education.
5. Not that it’s worth the paper its printed on, but still: Just 54 percent of Wisconsin adult education students testing for the General Educational Development certificate — the not Good Enough Diploma as I call it around here — completed the battery of exams needed to gain it, according to the American Council on Education. That’s lower than the 86 percent average. Only 44 percent passed it. The real question that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel should have asked is how many dropouts taking adult education classes for the test actually completed the classes.
6. The other question that should be asked? How many of those students are 16-to-18 year-olds who should be in high school in the first place. I’ll tell you this much: In Indiana, high school-participating teens accounted for 30 percent of the adult education enrollment. That was the third-highest percentage after Alabama and Vermont. The answer to the question would give some real insights into how poorly Wisconsin’s children are faring in school.
7. How about just giving the teens a strong academic education they can use anywhere: Such a statement goes counter to the position of school superintendent Paul R. Hay in the Mercury News, who contends that dropouts should learn technical skills. Essentially, one can conclude from his piece that he is suggesting a typical educator line: That at-risk students and dropouts are too inept to learn Trigonometry, Algebra or pre-Calculus (the first two, by the way, are used in welding and machine tool-making, both of which can be considered high-skilled ‘technical’ jobs). My question: Why can’t a plumber know Chaucer too? In fact, I know plenty of bus drivers in Indianapolis and in my hometown of New York that are better-traveled (and read) than some reporters, teachers and stock brokers.
8. Cutting out the shenanigans*: The New York Times actually calls for a smart improvement in the No Child Left Behind Act: Make states actually show that they are actually improving student learning instead of playing the gamesmanship of lowering standards, cut scores and other moves. One idea from the editorial board — or more likely Brent Staples, the resident education guru: “Congress needs to take the testing issue head-on. It should instruct the NAEP board, an independent body created by the government, to create a rigorous test that would be given free to states that agreed to use NAEP scoring standards.” Agreed.

What is going on inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day:

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.