Tag: dropouts

America’s Genocide Against Black People: Pandemic Edition

The coronavirus pandemic is a worldwide catastrophe that, as of this writing, is still developing in ways most of which are impossible to predict.  However, we can begin to anticipate…

The coronavirus pandemic is a worldwide catastrophe that, as of this writing, is still developing in ways most of which are impossible to predict.  However, we can begin to anticipate some its effects on one particularly vulnerable population: the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States.

Myths, especially when ideologically useful, are tenacious.  The myth of universal American prosperity is one of those. But in truth, American prosperity, even in normal times, is made inaccessible for a large part of the population by the nation’s White Supremacist framework. As a consequence it is conventional in international comparative socio-economic studies to treat the United States as two countries, one highly developed, to be compared with OECD states such as those in the European Union, the other ranking with less developed countries.  No prizes for realizing that the latter is inhabited by African-Americans, who, by every relevant measure, live in another country, as it were, from their more prosperous White fellow citizens.

The U.S. Census numbers tell the story: in 2018 13 percent of all people (and the same percentage of White people), lived at or below the poverty line of $26,200 for a family of four, while nearly twice that percentage, 23 percent of African-Americans lived in poverty. If we count households, rather than individuals, 17 percent of White households have incomes below the poverty line, compared, again, to nearly twice that percentage, in this case 32 percent of Black households. 

Life below the poverty level, and life for those with incomes approaching it, is in normal times differentiated from the life of the American Dream by the all too concrete reality of little food, inadequate access to good quality education, bad health and shorter lives.  For many Black Americans those are the factors of day to day reality. But these are not normal times. 

In these plague days, many Black Americans will be even less likely to have adequate access to food, their children will be less likely to have access to adequate educational resources, and will therefore as adults lack the necessary qualifications for middle class employment.  In the long run this will result in even lower near-term and life-time incomes with all that implies in poor health and  shorter lives, for individuals, for their children, and for Black America. A crucial matter here is potential pandemic learning loss and its implications for Black school children, especially those living in high poverty or near poverty households.

As the conclusion reached by this blog will be disturbing and probably controversial, it would be best to work toward it carefully, step by step, at each step comparing the situation of Black Americans, children and adults, to that of White Americans, as it is the inequities that journey will reveal that are, in a sense, both resultant and causal.

James Thomas helps his son Jamal Lee Jr., 10, re-create a lung with a balloon and plastic bottle during an online science class at their San Leandro home as his other son, Javaughn Thomas, 7, watches.
For Black families such as that of James Thomas, the pandemic is now forcing them to come up with ways to augment what is being lost because school buildings are closed. [Photo courtesy of Gabrielle Lurie, San Francisco Chronicle.]

As we have just seen, Black families are more likely to be poor than White families. There are poor White families, of course, but the percentage of poor Black families is routinely much higher than the percentage of poor White families. Median incomes in 2018 were $65,900 for White households, $41,500 for Black households—Black families on average live on less than two-thirds of the incomes of White families and two-thirds of Black households have incomes below the median for White households. Even in good times, before the financial crisis and then again just before the pandemic, twice the percentage of Black households as the general population lived in poverty. This extends to their children in an even more severe fashion. Before the pandemic, approximately 15 percent of White children under age 18 lived in households with incomes below the poverty line. That percentage for Black children was 35 percent, or more than one in three.

Black families are likely to be poor; Black children are very likely to live in poor households; schools attended predominantly by Black children are likely to be poorly resourced.  Racial inequities in education—that pre-existing condition—are apparent in the acquisition of basic skills.  In 2019, before the pandemic, at the crucial middle school grade eight, 81 percent of White, non-Hispanic, students scored at or above the Basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ reading test; however, only 54 percent of Black students did so.  Or, to put it another way, just 19 percent of White students, but 46 percent – nearly half – of Black students read below the Basic level in eighth grade. They could not easily read. That is the racial divide—not the cause, but the result of inequality of resources and opportunities.

Household income not only affects educational achievement; it is affected by constraints of educational attainment and those inflicted because of race. For example, in 2016, median annual earnings of full-time, year-round, workers 25 to 34 years old who had not completed high school were $29,100 for White workers and $21,400 for Black workers.  For those who had completed high school, incomes were nearly $6,000 per year higher: $35,000, for White workers and $27,500 for Black workers.  For those with a Bachelor’s degree or higher, median incomes were $54,700 for White workers and $49,400 for Black workers. Increasing educational attainment narrowed the income gap, but did not close it.  And a smaller percentage of Black Americans attained a college degree than did White Americans: 15 percent compared to 24 percent.

Now for the probable effects of the pandemic on education, especially as it may affect African-Americans, and a look at the likely consequences of those effects.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in the school year 2017-2018 the graduation rate for White high school students was 89 percent.  That for Black students was 79 percent, or ten percentage points lower. The 21 percent of Black students who did not graduate from high school may well have had to anticipate spending  their lives in poverty, given that the poverty line is $26,200 and the average income of Black workers without a high school diploma is just $21,400. That, we may have to say, is normal.

Of course, these are not normal times. Most public schools have been closed for the entire second quarter of 2020. What are the implications of that for student learning? Studies of attendance absenteeism show that missing three or more weeks of school diminishes chances for high school graduation and that this begins as early as first grade. Most students in every grade have now missed three months of school, whether or not we call it “absenteeism.”  Those with limited or no access to supplementary (remote) education will have “diminished chances for high school graduation”. We mean youth in grade twelve, youth in grade eight, even children in kindergarten.

Most public school students have not been to their schools for at least twelve weeks and have been dependent on the Internet for education. Students who normally attend well-resourced schools, whose parents are college-educated and whose homes have access to broadband may have been spending  their days in what might be called enhanced home schooling.  Their schools may have delivered lessons in a variety of ways, including Zoom and the like, and their parents may have served as supplementary educators. Those students may have experienced little or no learning loss.

As might be expected, Internet access varies with household income as well as parental educational attainment.  And by race, of course.  A recent Pew Research Center study found that 79 percent of White homes had broadband access, compared to 66 percent of Black homes. 

Further, more than 90 percent of students in households with incomes over $75,000 and those whose parents were college graduates had broadband access in their homes. [Just a quarter of Black households have incomes over $75,000.] On the other hand, just 46% of homes in which the adults are without a high school diploma have broadband. We can conclude from this that nearly all White students living in middle class or more prosperous households potentially have benefited from schooling available from Internet-based lessons supported by home tutoring, while perhaps half of Black students have not had those advantages. Without broadband access to the Internet and without highly educated parents, students are likely to have simply missed out on schooling. The New York Times reported in April that in some cities between a third and a half of high school students were not logging on for classes.

Thanks to the Trump regime, along with Republican governors as well as well-to-do families clamoring for schools to reopen – even if it endangers low income, Black and Latino families who prefer to stay home- many districts and school systems are even further behind on providing virtual instruction that may be somewhat better than what happened last year.

Black students are the most likely to live in households in or near poverty, least likely to have college educated parents, least likely to have broadband access and most likely to have attended poorly resourced schools. They are particularly likely to incur complete or nearly complete interruptions in their schooling during the pandemic. 

Those families with the means to afford whiteboards and tutor – most of whom aren’t Black or Brown – will manage to escape another education crisis. Many Black and Latino families won’t be able to do that without additional federal and state resources. [Photo by RiShawn Biddle]

The data presented to this point allows for some approximations of the near-term and long-term implications of the pandemic for Black students and their communities. 

We can begin with the 21 percent of Black students who even in the recent rather good year did not graduate from high school.  We might add to those a portion of the 46 percent of Black students who read below the Basic level in grade 8.  Making the generous assumption that the 21 percent who did not graduate from high school are already accounted for among those who had not been taught to read with any facility by middle school gives us an additional 25 percent who under normal circumstances would be at risk of not graduating from high school.  It is not unreasonable to assume that given the pandemic, limited broadband access and the like, these are now as a matter of fact unlikely to graduate from high school. We therefore can work with a rough estimate that half of Black students who were in grade 12 in 2019-20 will not graduate from high school this year.  And the educational attainment of their siblings and other Black students at every grade also will be significantly delayed.

Many schools will, no doubt, make increasingly effective provisions for reaching their students in the 2020-2021 school year.  Educators, like office workers, will become accustomed to performing their tasks remotely, or through a combination of in-person and remote activities.  Student learning loss will gradually return to traditional—unsatisfactory—levels.  But this will not happen all at once and in the meantime large numbers of the most vulnerable students will not receive the level of instruction symbolized by a high school diploma. At best, they will have to repeat a year of school, whether or not that is officially admitted. 

If this is done in parallel with the usual school year, as it probably will if it is done at all, it will require districts to massively increase educational resources, including the number of teachers.  This does not only apply to the k-12 system.  It also applies in the post-secondary world, especially to community colleges, which will find themselves compelled to provide the instruction for their incoming freshman that those students missed due to the pandemic. They may, in effect, become three-year rather than two-year institutions.

We can now put some numbers to this.  If half of the 2020 cohort of Black twelfth graders do not receive meaningful high school diplomas, rather than the fifth that is to be expected in a normal year, then the potential income of each will decline from $27,500 to $21,400. Over a working life of 45 years, this would amount to a lifetime earning loss of $275,000. Given a 2019-20 grade 12 class of approximately 531,000 Black students, this would result in a loss of $73 billion for the Black American community if half do not receive high school diplomas. We can add to this the lost wages of those Black Americans who, for the same reasons, would not have attended and graduated from college.  Call it $80 billion lost to Black America just from the lost wages of what would have been the 2020 graduating class and their peers.

But that is only the beginning.  Learning loss from the pandemic will extend to every school grade: each child in the affected households will lose up to a year of learning opportunities.  Large numbers of those who normally would have achieved at least a high school degree will not complete their educations. And for all of these, the effects will continue within their families as their children grow up in households with parents who are less well-educated than they might have been and their educational attainment, in turn, will be compromised by lower household incomes and a less educationally resourced family.

We know from Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas that the likelihood of Black children in low income households becoming adults with middle or high incomes is minimal.  For those born into low income households in New York City, for example, the Opportunity Atlas projects adult household income at $28,000.  For high income Black households, the corresponding figure is $38,000.  It is much higher for low income White households: $48,000. As a matter of fact, nationally, incomes are higher for White residents born into low income families than those for Black residents born into high income households. That is normal in a racially structured society.

Given pandemic learning loss the number of Black children who will be born into low income families will rise, probably considerably, a condition that that the Opportunity Atlas tells us will in many cases be handed down to their children.  While White children born into low income families, even under these dire conditions, have a good chance of climbing the proverbial ladder out of poverty, Black children have the heavy anchor of racism tied to their legs.  Those begin life in poverty are likely to live their lives in poverty and their children to do so as well.

Given this country’s history and its present situation, one hardly dares recommend what might be done to avoid this dismal future for Black children, for all children in this country whose homes do not have the educational resources to replace those lost to the pandemic.  However, this is America, we can hope, hope that government, at all levels, will act to avoid this catastrophe by both traditional and innovative resourcing of the education system. 

In the short term, universal broadband access for all households with school age children, providing challenging and engaging lessons, utilizing  the possibilities of the Internet for customizing learning. In the longer term, improving pay for teachers and providing career ladders that do not require that they leave the classroom. Rebuilding America’s schools and the buildings they reside in.  Abandoning the model of institutions of higher education as profit-making enterprises. Adapting an attitude for which investments in education at all levels are seen as a public good. Ending racial and gender disparities in the economy.  And so forth. And so forth.

As with Pandora’s box, we are left, at least, with hope.

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Voices of the Dropout Nation: Steve Evangelista on Building Connections Between Schools and Students


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When Dropout Nation met with Steve Evangelista earlier this year, the Teach-for-America alum-turned-charter school founder was struggling with the news that one of his former pupils during his teaching days…

Photo courtesy of Harlem Link Charter School

When Dropout Nation met with Steve Evangelista earlier this year, the Teach-for-America alum-turned-charter school founder was struggling with the news that one of his former pupils during his teaching days had landed in Rykers Island, New York City’s notorious city jail. For the co-director of the Harlem Link Charter School, the news led him to ask some important questions about how teachers and schools could build long-term connections that can keep students on the track to graduation and to fulfilling their economic and social destinies. His efforts was profiled on the Dropout Nation Podcast on building long-lasting connections between students and teachers.

This week, Evangelista offers some more thoughts and observations on what schools and teachers must do to keep kids from dropping out. As you read it, consider what more can be done in making the relationships between schools and the students they serve more meaningful.

Until we decide as a nation that we are going to ask ourselves tough questions about where our bright young pupils wind up five, ten and fifteen years after they pass through our classrooms –- and act courageously to address the shortcomings we will inevitably find –- educators will continue shortchanging the families we purport to serve.

As the cofounder and co-director of a charter elementary school in Harlem that only this summer graduated its first class of fifth graders, I think about these tough questions as often as I can these days.  With school back in full swing, it’s easy to focus only on the 300 charges in front of me, but a recent incident brought questions about the future back to the forefront.

The chaos of dismissal in the first two weeks was winding down.  School had been open for us for a week and we had our basic routines down, but the three district schools with whom we share a building were only just beginning their year, adding a new layer of complexity to our dismissal.  Still, within 15 minutes of dismissal each bus had the right students, every child had been picked up, the partner after-school program’s escorts had checked their lists twice and were on their way with their small groups of kids.  So when my co-director came to me that late afternoon and said, “There’s something you’ve got to see on the fourth floor,” I thought, “Oh, no, and I thought I could finally get some paperwork done!”

When I got up to the fourth floor, where our two fifth grade classes are located, she pointed the way to one of those rooms and I saw what she wanted me to see: three sixth graders, sitting around the table with a social worker and a teacher.  After their first day of school at their new middle school downtown, Qiana, Mark and Ashanti had come back to Harlem Link because they just couldn’t stay away.  In my letter to them as part of our first graduating fifth grade class this summer, I promised them that we would have our first annual reunion in October 2012, that we would continue to support them and be part of their lives, and never lose touch with them.  As our social worker said, “They walked right in like they own the place.”  And I responded, “You know what?  They do!”

The rapid return of our first few alumni – and the certitude that they and their classmates will continue to return – reminded me of the Roseto Effect, with which Malcolm Gladwell opens his recent book, Outliers.  The 1966 Roseto study describes two communities with the same diet, exercise and physical environment but with different patterns of community interaction – and radically different heart disease survival rates.  Researchers concluded that members of a community confer a significant physical health benefit upon themselves by spending quality time together, supporting each other, caring about each other.

The smiling faces of Mark, Qiana and Ashanti, a couple of inches taller, but sitting around a table in their old classroom like they were still in fifth grade, also brought to mind another famous author writing about 2,300 years earlier.  Aristotle described the four causes of any object, the most metaphysical being the final cause – the thing’s purpose or reason for existing.  The final cause of a chair is to allow people to sit.  The final cause of our school is to graduate scholars empowered to take an active role in their own learning and citizens who are part of a safe, supportive learning community.  The three alumni reminded me of that final cause.

I’ve always believed that it’s only possible to create an environment where powerful relationships between students and teachers develop and where students are engaged in productive learning at school when there is coherent community agreement on the final cause of education.  Where the principles of community health, as it were, apply to the very purpose of schooling.  That’s why, when I started teaching in the 1990s I was surprised at how little agreement there is on such a basic question as the final cause of a school.  I’m not talking about agreement at the federal level, or even the state level.  Or district level.  I’m talking about how little agreement there often is about the purpose of schooling within an individual school.

It’s the popular fashion today to say that all the problems in schools can be fixed by having great teachers.  I discovered early in my teaching career, in my futile attempt to become one of those great teachers that I could only do so much by myself.  This concept of community health, of agreement on the final cause, is an essential ingredient to the existence of great teachers.  A logical conclusion that should be obvious to anyone who has observed schools in a variety of settings is that a great teacher at your school might not be a great teacher at my school, and vice versa.  A great teacher is not so great if he or she is not swimming in the same direction as the rest of the community.

So educators: what happens to students ten and fifteen years after they leave your care?  Can you answer that question?  If I went up to any random individual who works at your school with you, what would that person say?  That’s my test for whether your school community’s final cause facilitates long-term relationships between students and teachers.  Unfortunately, given my experience and knowing the pressures and the direction of education reform in our country, I would wager that in most at-risk communities school staff would have a hard time answering the question.

I know that we are on the right track at Harlem Link, because when Mark, Qiana and Ashanti came storming in like they owned the place, one of the first things they asked was, “Are we really having our first annual reunion in 2012?”  These three students, and their many classmates with the same attitude, understand that our school’s community goal is focused on their long term success.  Would that we had some kind of national agreement on the point.

Disclosure: All Voices of the Dropout Nation commentary are opinions of the writers and not of Dropout Nation, The RiShawn Biddle Consultancy or RiShawn Biddle. If you want to make your voice heard, sent your commentary to rbiddle-at-dropoutnation.net. Dropout Nation reserves the right to edit all commentary for style, clarity and standards.

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The Read: Thinks tanks go wild edition


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NEWS AND COMMENTARY FROM AROUND the dropout nation. Updates are marked with an *: Widespread academic failure — on an international scale: Last week, during a debate with immigration skeptic…

The real question isn't about the effectiveness of vouchers, but about assuring every child gets a chance at a high-quality education that gets each one on the path to success in their life. (Photo courtesy of Viewimages)

The real question isn't about the effectiveness of vouchers, but about assuring every child gets a chance at a high-quality education that gets each one on the path to success in their life. (Photo courtesy of Viewimages)

NEWS AND COMMENTARY FROM AROUND the dropout nation. Updates are marked with an *:

  • Widespread academic failure — on an international scale: Last week, during a debate with immigration skeptic Norman Matloff, he disputed my citing of PISA and TIMMS international testing results, which showed American students scoring in the 95th percentile — the nation’s best students — trailing their peers in ten countries. He continued arguing that the academic underperformance was merely limited to an “underclass” of poor students, even though these are unlikely to be the poorest students and more likely to be the product of middle-class households. Now, at Edspresso, Vicki Murray and Evelyn Stacey of the Pacific Research Institute offer more evidence that academic failure and underperformance extends beyond the poorest Americans. Half the students at one in every ten middle-class California schools, for example, are failing the state’s CST standards test.
  • The source of academic struggle: EducationNews.org’s Michael Shaughnessy interviews George Leef, who had written a piece earlier this week on the woeful math instruction training at America’s education schools. Leef offers another reason why many teachers have become inept at teaching math: “Many students grow up with teachers who have been trained to think that feeling good is more important than getting correct answers.” And the administrators and the parents sometimes engage in the same garbage. Why does anyone think social promotion — moving kids from grade to grade despite failing school — continues to exist despite evidence that it is an abject failure?
  • The value of vouchers: Edsize’s Leo Casey accuses voucher supporters of cherry-picking studies that support their positions. Jay Greene responds by listing a series of different studies proving the value of the school choice plans. Greg Forster joins the fray by offering the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation’s latest report on the Ohio voucher program. Andrew Coulson also joins in on the fun. All of this began with Greene demanding that Casey and his allies in the Broader, Bolder Coalition submit their concept for school reform to major study.
  • At least the argument isn’t pointless like the debate over whether it is proper for the latest book released by Fordham to have “Paternalism” in the title. Or the debate among priests over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
  • And the usefulness of national standards: Neil McCluskey of Cato calls out Fordham and Mike Petrilli for not responding to McCluskey’s question (and that of Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham) as to whether the political forces at the state level that often collide over development of curriculum standards won’t rear themselves during the development of national standards. Petrilli responds. All I’ll say is if you think the battle between advocates of phonics and supporters of whole language was rather nasty, wait until USDOE tries to develop standards for history. The NAACP, La Raza and the Knights of Columbus will get into this, along with the NEA, the AFT and the other usual suspects.
  • Here is the REL WestEd study of dropouts and the revolving door at San Bernardino schools mentioned on Dropout Nation last week. Read. Think. Take action.
  • But will they keep them there: Schools in Texas are trying to get dropouts to re-enroll in school. But they have until the end of September to make it happen. Or else they won’t get any money for them. Yes, it is always about the money.

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This is Dropout Nation: Liberty, New York


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One wouldn’t think this town, two hours north of New York City, would be swamped with a dropout crisis. As a district bordering between farming country and suburbia, just 32…

The Town & Country Building is tackily tasty. But the school district isn't. Courtesy of Agilitynut.com

The Town & Country Building is tackily tasty. But the school district isn't. (Courtesy of Agilitynut.com)

One wouldn’t think this town, two hours north of New York City, would be swamped with a dropout crisis. As a district bordering between farming country and suburbia, just 32 percent of the Liberty Central Schools District’s enrollment are Latino, black or Native American; the remaining 68 percent are white.

The district and its only high school, however, is as much a dropout factory as the collection of high schools that make up the far larger — and more diverse — Gotham system.

Fifty-six percent of the freshmen entering high school in the Liberty district actually graduated in four years, according to the New York State Education Department. Even worse, the problem isn’t simply among the few students with disabilities, whose graduation rate is an abysmal 21 percent. A mere 63 percent of Liberty’s freshmen in the general population garnered a sheepskin; two out of every five students either likely dropped out, failed to garner enough credits for graduation (which will likely lead them to leave without a diploma) or transferred to other school districts (from which they will likely drop out).

This isn’t a new trend. Just 56 percent of the 8th-graders who made up the district’s class of 2005 two years ago actually graduated in five years, according to an analysis of data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education; a mere 53 percent of the district’s freshmen walked away with a sheepskin in four years. This despite the fact that a not-so-great 74 percent of students were promoted from 8th-to-12th grade during that period.

What’s wrong with Liberty? The problems begin early. Just 13 percent of 4th graders scored in the Level 4 (r top percentile) range on the state’s standardized test, while 41 percent of Liberty’s 4th-graders had scores in the lowest levels of the test; the statewide average is, respectively, 21 percent and 41 percent. Twenty-one percent of Liberty’s 4th-graders scored in the lowest two levels of the math portion of the exam, higher than the 17 percent statewide average. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the district’s 8th-graders scored in the bottom two levels of the state’s English exam; only a merely attrocious 53 percent of the state’s 8th graders overall scored that low.

These are students woefully prepared to stay in school, much less graduate. Proving once again that the ills of dropout nation aren’t limited to the heart of Urban America.

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Watch and Learn: Why alternative schools aren’t educational


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Alternative high schools are often touted as solutions to stemming dropouts. But the evidence so far only shows that these programs do little more than serve as a way-station for…

Alternative high schools are often touted as solutions to stemming dropouts. But the evidence so far only shows that these programs do little more than serve as a way-station for students on their way to leaving school without a diploma. In this video, Los Angeles Times reporter Duke Helfand and a couple of at-risk women students discusses what happens to these students on their way out. Pay special attention to the first woman, who talks about her conversation with a guidance counselor about her academic failure.


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The Read


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Reports and observations inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day: Doesn’t get it: Joseph Brown of the Tampa Tribune, horrified about Florida’s low graduation rate…

A white male dropout who lands in prison has a one-in-six chance of landing in prison, according to Princeton University researcher Bruce Western. A black male dropout has a three-in-five chance of heading into prison. No matter the disparity, it's disheartening. Photo courtesy of Adobe Systems.

THE PRICE OF DROPPING OUT: A white male dropout who lands in prison has a one-in-six chance of landing in prison, according to Princeton University researcher Bruce Western. A black male dropout has a three-in-five chance of heading into prison. No matter the disparity, it's disheartening. (Photo courtesy of Adobe Systems.)

Reports and observations inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day:

  1. Doesn’t get it: Joseph Brown of the Tampa Tribune, horrified about Florida’s low graduation rate for black males (as analyzed by the Schott Foundation), argues that dropouts “fail to see the connection between education and a good job” and “apparently neither do their parents.” He isn’t completely wrong about that. However, Brown doesn’t address the underlying causes of the dropout crisis that have little to do with parents or their children, including low-quality public school curricula and teachers that aren’t well-prepared to teach in urban school systems.
  2. And sometimes, parents can be the problem: Education officials in Georgia finally did something right and reformed its woeful math curriculum standards. Achieve Inc. rates the standards among the highest of the “early adopter” states it is monitoring as part of its American Diploma Project. And now the standards must be applied to 9th-grade students. So what are suburban Atlanta parents doing, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution? Complaining (naturally) about the fact that their children are failing exams based on those new standards. They’re likely worried that the kids won’t get into the University of Georgia, the college of first choice for most Peach State parents. What they should be doing is complaining about the quality of instruction in their school districts. And yes, get their kids some tutoring.
  3. The end of old-school black politics: Over the past few years, I have discussed the growing conflict between old-school black politicians — who emerged out of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s by parlaying political machines, race-baiting, appeals to black pride and doling out welfare to poor constituents — and an iconoclastic new generation of young black politicians — middle-class, highly-educated, unburdened by the memories of Jim Crow segregation — who are looking to deal with the woeful economic and social status of their communities. Now, Matt Bai profiles the divide in The New York Times Magazine. The real chasm between the two generations, from where I sit, will really manifest themselves in discussions about improving urban schools, largely because they are largely-controlled by old-school black politicians and school officials who are less than attentive to their woeful performance.
  4. No wonder why D.C. residents want self-government: The Washington Post notes the latest round of shenanigans surrounding re-authorization of the District’s five-year-old voucher program. The city’s mayor, Adrian Fenty — once an opponent of the program — must “clearly explain” to Congress how the voucher program is helping children escape the city’s atrocious dropout factories and academic failure mills at the elementary- and junior high school level in order for the program to survive another year.
  5. They’re the tops — but not outside America: At Eduwonkette, skoolboy checks out Fordham’s Educational Olympics and notes the dismal performance of America’s top students versus the rest of the world. Ten countries have top high school sophomores that perform better on the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) than our nation’s top 10th-graders. Not good at all.
  6. Can the kids be taught? Ken DeRosa and Charles Murray (he of the infamous Bell Curve and more recent inanities about education) have a back-and-forth on teaching students of modest IQ levels.
  7. Teach For America and its professional development: Alexander Russo reports on the alternative teacher training group’s response to critics about its support for new teachers.

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