Dropout Nation

The reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, now overdue and overpoliticized, took another baby step in June when the Senate education committee passed a bill without any Republican support. In July, the House of Representatives managed to pass a version of a bill that received exactly no Democratic support. And for 16 days in October, we witnessed partisanship at its worst with a government shutdown that doesn’t portend good things for the children of America.

What makes these episodes so discouraging, beyond legislators’ feigning seriousness about what should be a national priority, is that NCLB—the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—is the most progressive development in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Education. Within its reauthorization rests the fate of 50 million students…

There is a disquieting truth about policy, which is that is does not achieve what it intends; it achieves what it allows. And the simple truth is that education policy prior to No Child Left Behind allowed schools to be evaluated in the aggregate. In this shameful holdover from the separate-but-equal doctrine, the performance of subgroups—including minorities, students with disabilities, students of lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and girls—was largely ignored. NCLB requires a disaggregation of assessment data and measures improvement not just of the school as a whole, but also of subgroups, heretofore invisible in many schools across the country.

Fast forward to Rancocas Valley Regional High School today—a one-time NCLB school “in need of whole-school restructuring,” the federal label for “failing,” in Burlington County, N.J. In 2013, its 2,200-student enrollment reflects the growing diversity and poverty level in America: Approximately 48 percent of the students are nonwhite, 23 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch, and 19 percent receive special services. In 2005, we received that federal label because of our inability to demonstrate adequate yearly progress for the subgroups on the state’s High School Proficiency Assessment…

To turn this situation around, the school’s leadership team adopted an empirical, data-driven approach to its work, and the faculty redoubled its efforts to reach every child. The faculty created an individualized educational experience for every child, believing in each student’s ability to be successful—as our school, our state, and the federal government define it. And so we evolved. We became a standards-based school, not rhetorically, but holistically. From daily lessons to course maps to common end-of-course assessments, the gap between what was taught and what was measured diminished greatly.

The administration partnered with the faculty to raise standards by eliminating course offerings that lacked rigor, a process known as “detracking.” On-level courses were set at a college-prep level. The career-and-college-prep level, where our faculty and counselors had guided students with academic difficulties, was eliminated. Those same students can now share demanding curriculum alongside stronger students with better parent advocacy… We committed ourselves to equalizing the learning experiences for our regular and special education students. No Child Left Behind’s requirement for highly qualified teachers motivated us to send our special education teachers back to school. They learned subject-area curricula equal to the knowledge of any content-area expert. Our classrooms are co-taught by educators with subject-area and pedagogical expertise…

The result? In 2013, more than 96 percent of our students achieved proficiency in language arts literacy on state assessments. Our students with disabilities achieved 73 percent proficiency. By comparison, in 2008, these numbers were 80 percent and 36 percent, respectively. We narrowed the achievement gap dramatically in the same subject. Our African-American students achieved 96.6 percent proficiency, compared with 68 percent in 2008. Our white students achieved 97.4 percent proficiency compared with 93 percent in 2008. The jump in math was also significant. We reached 93 percent proficiency overall, compared with 72 percent in 2008. Our economically disadvantaged students achieved 78 percent proficiency, compared with 42 percent in 2008.

Rancocas Valley Regional High School District Superintendent Jerry Jelig, in Education Week, explaining how the No Child Left Behind Act’s strong accountability measures helped drive the district to transform education for the children in its care. Such successes show why the Obama Administration’s effort to eviscerate No Child will end up damaging all children, including those from poor and minority backgrounds who have benefited (and need the benefits) the most.

Mathematics education in the United States is broken. Open any newspaper and stories of math failure shout from the pages: low international rankings, widespread innumeracy in the general population, declines in math majors. Here’s the most shocking statistic I have read in recent years: 60 percent of the 13 million two-year college students in the U.S. are currently placed into remedial math courses; 75 percent of them fail or drop the courses and leave college with no degree.

We need to change the way we teach math in the U.S., and it is for this reason that I support the move to Common Core mathematics. The new curriculum standards that are currently being rolled out in 45 states do not incorporate all the changes that this country needs, by any means, but they are a necessary step in the right direction…

In mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists.  This idea is made even more damaging by harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass. Narrow mathematics teaching combined with low and stereotypical expectations for students are the two main reasons that the U.S. is in dire mathematical straights…

An important requirement in the Common Core is the need for students to discuss ideas and justify their thinking. There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.

Mathematicians are not the only people who need to engage in justification and reasoning. The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them. In our new technological world, employers do not need people who can calculate correctly or fast, they need people who can reason about approaches, estimate and verify results, produce and interpret different powerful representations, and connect with other people’s mathematical ideas.

Stanford University Professor Jo Boaler, in the Atlantic Monthy, explaining how Common Core’s math standards can help children develop the habits of mind needed to both master algebra and think through the abstractions that underlie daily life. This is a point made by Dropout Nation last month in the second podcast in the series on Common Core. Listen to the third Dropout Nation Podcast in the series.

My son, William, is a young man whose direction in life changed because of school choice. [School choice works]… our entire family benefited.

Virginia Walden Ford, whose proto-Parent Power activism in Washington, D.C., spurred reforms that are benefiting kids in the District three decades later, on Twitter, explaining why expanding school choice and Parent Power helps children and the families who love them.

I wrote the nation’s first parent-trigger law. I acted because I understood that education is the civil rights issue of our time and the key to the American dream. I’m the daughter of a mother who attained only a 6th grade education, but who understood that education is what lifts us out of poverty. As a Democratic senator representing the diverse, heavily Latino East Los Angeles-eastern Los Angeles County community and the chair of both the state Senate’s education and prison oversight committees, I understood that if we do not educate, we will incarcerate. California locks away a disproportionate number of Latino and African-American youths, and, nationwide, nearly 70 percent of inmates are high school dropouts.

For years, California’s education department routinely released data on schools with disturbingly high—indeed, morally shameful—percentages of children who fail to score at even basic levels of academic proficiency. These are schools identified as chronically underperforming and in need of intervention, but all too often they were simply ignored, forgotten on bureaucratic lists. Nothing was ever done for them. Ironically, many of these schools were named for civil rights heroes, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Nonetheless, they were left to languish year after year, most parents unaware of their status. In the 15 years since I was first elected to the legislature, some of those same schools have appeared on the lists again and again.

I am a product of the civil rights movement. I graduated from a high school where I was “counseled” that college was beyond my reach—after all, I lived in one of those zip codes, at the end of a dead-end road in a mostly rural county. But with a mother who had faith and inspiration drawn from the late John F. Kennedy, a farmworkers’ movement, and an intense love of learning, I rose to become the Senate majority leader of the state of California…

In no other part of American life do we tie parents to the land, define them by zip code, and empower government officials who are strangers to families to make fundamental, life-altering decisions on behalf of their children based on five digits of geographic identity. The zip code has become the definitive great divide, a profound separation between high-poverty, minority youths and the American dream.

Undoubtedly, if sweetheart contracts didn’t enable effective teachers to bypass struggling neighborhood schools, and if bureaucrats actually used the federal laws at their disposal to transform such schools, I never would have had to write the parent-trigger law. But that was not the case. Lists of failing schools, representing hundreds of thousands of kids in California, were simply released and promptly ignored. Few people even knew about the lists, and those who did weren’t outraged. So I looked back to the foundations of our democracy and gave parents the right to take on their own government when it refused to act on behalf of their children.

Former California State Senator Gloria Romero, who now runs the Foundation for Parent Empowerment, reminding all of us why Parent Trigger laws and other Parent Power measures are critical to breaking the cycle of educational abuse and neglect heaped upon so many of our children.