Who Gets to Graduate?

In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost no cost, had apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by more than half.

Who Gets to Graduate?
By PAUL TOUGH
New York Times
MAY 15, 2014

When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there are a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation...

In 1999, at the beginning of the fall semester, Laude combed through the records of every student in his freshman chemistry class and identified about 50 who possessed at least two of the “adversity indicators” common among students who failed the course in the past: low SATs, low family income, less-educated parents. He invited them all to apply to a new program, which he would later give the august-sounding name the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan, or TIP. Students in TIP were placed in their own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by Laude. But rather than dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same challenging material as the students in his larger section. In fact, he scheduled his two sections back to back. “I taught my 500-student chemistry class, and then I walked upstairs and I taught this 50-student chemistry class,” Laude explained. “Identical material, identical lectures, identical tests — but a 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections.”

Laude was hopeful that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We weren’t naïve enough to think they were just going to show up and start getting A’s, unless we overwhelmed them with the kind of support that would make it possible for them to be successful,” he said. So he supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.

Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T. average.

Two years ago, Laude was promoted to his current position — senior vice provost for enrollment and graduation management. His official mission now is to improve U.T.’s four-year graduation rate, which is currently languishing at around 52 percent, to 70 percent — closer to the rates at U.T.’s state-university peers in Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill and Charlottesville, Va. — and to achieve this leap by 2017. The best way to do that, Laude decided, was to take the principles and practices that he introduced 15 years earlier with TIP and bring them to the whole Austin campus.

One complicating factor for administrators at the University of Texas — and, indeed, one reason the school makes for such an interesting case study — is that U.T. has a unique admissions policy, one that is the legacy of many years of legal and legislative battles over affirmative action. After U.T.’s use of race in admissions was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit in 1996, the Texas Legislature came up with an alternative strategy to maintain a diverse campus: the Top 10 percent law, which stipulated that students who ranked in the top tenth of their graduating classes in any high school in Texas would be automatically admitted to the campus of their choice in the U.T. system. (As U.T. Austin has grown more popular over the last decade, the criterion for automatic admission has tightened; Texas high-school seniors now have to be in the top 7 percent of their class to earn admission. Automatic admits — Vanessa Brewer among them — make up about three-quarters of each freshman class.)

At high schools in the wealthier suburbs of Dallas, the top 7 percent of students look a lot like the students anywhere who go on to attend elite colleges. They are mostly well off and mostly white, and most of them rack up high SAT scores. What sets U.T. apart from other selective colleges is that the school also admits the top 7 percent of students from high schools in Brownsville and the Third Ward of Houston, who fit a very different demographic and have, on average, much lower SAT scores.

The good news about these kids, from U.T.’s point of view, is that they are very good students regardless of their test scores. Even if their high schools weren’t as well funded or as academically demanding as schools in other parts of the state, they managed to figure out how to learn, how to study and how to overcome adversity. Laude’s experience teaching Chemistry 301 convinced him that they could succeed and even excel at the University of Texas. But when he looked at the campuswide data, it was clear that these were the students who weren’t succeeding.

“There are always going to be both affluent kids and kids who have need who come into this college,” Laude said. “And it will always be the case that the kids who have need are going to have been denied a lot of the academic preparation and opportunities for identity formation that the affluent kids have been given. The question is, can we do something for those students in their first year in college that can accelerate them and get them up to the place where they can be competitive with the affluent, advantaged students?”...

Though Laude is a chemist by training, he spends much of his time thinking like a psychologist, pondering what kind of messages or environmental cues might affect the decisions that the students in his programs make. He’s the first to admit that he is an amateur psychologist at best. But he has found an ally and a kindred spirit in a psychological researcher at U.T. named David Yeager, a 32-year-old assistant professor who is emerging as one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of education. In his research, Yeager is trying to answer the question that Laude wrestles with every day: How, precisely, do you motivate students to take the steps they need to take in order to succeed?

Before he arrived at U.T. in the winter of 2012, Yeager worked as a graduate student in the psychology department at Stanford, during an era when that department had become a hotbed of new thinking on the psychology of education. Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude Steele and Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the experience of students from early childhood all the way through college. To the extent that the Stanford researchers shared a unifying vision, it was the belief that students were often blocked from living up to their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and doubts about their ability. These feelings were especially virulent at moments of educational transition — like the freshman year of high school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be particularly debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves to be under some special threat or scrutiny: women in engineering programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans in the Ivy League.

The negative thoughts took different forms in each individual, of course, but they mostly gathered around two ideas. One set of thoughts was about belonging. Students in transition often experienced profound doubts about whether they really belonged — or could ever belong — in their new institution. The other was connected to ability. Many students believed in what Carol Dweck had named an entity theory of intelligence — that intelligence was a fixed quality that was impossible to improve through practice or study. And so when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance — they would often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts about belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and together they created a sense of helplessness. That helplessness dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why study if I can’t get smarter? Why go out and meet new friends if no one will want to talk to me anyway? Before long, the nagging doubts became self-fulfilling prophecies.

When Yeager arrived at Stanford in 2006, many of the researchers there had begun to move beyond trying to understand this phenomenon to trying to counteract it. In a series of experiments, they found that certain targeted messages, delivered to students in the right way at the right time, seemed to overcome the doubts about belonging and ability that were undermining the students’ academic potential.

Yeager began working with a professor of social psychology named Greg Walton, who had identified principles that seemed to govern which messages, and which methods of delivering those messages, were most persuasive to students. For instance, messages worked better if they appealed to social norms; when college students are informed that most students don’t take part in binge drinking, they’re less likely to binge-drink themselves. Messages were also more effective if they were delivered in a way that allowed the recipients a sense of autonomy. If you march all the high-school juniors into the auditorium and force them to watch a play about tolerance and inclusion, they’re less likely to take the message to heart than if they feel as if they are independently seeking it out. And positive messages are more effectively absorbed when they are experienced through what Walton called “self-persuasion”: if students watch a video or read an essay with a particular message and then write their own essay or make their own video to persuade future students, they internalize the message more deeply.

In one experiment after another, Yeager and Walton’s methods produced remarkable results. At an elite Northeastern college, Walton, along with another Stanford researcher named Geoffrey Cohen, conducted an experiment in which first-year students read brief essays by upperclassmen recalling their own experiences as freshmen. The upperclassmen conveyed in their own words a simple message about belonging: “When I got here, I thought I was the only one who felt left out. But then I found out that everyone feels that way at first, and everyone gets over it. I got over it, too.” After reading the essays, the students in the experiment then wrote their own essays and made videos for future students, echoing the same message. The whole intervention took no more than an hour. It had no apparent effect on the white students who took part in the experiment. But it had a transformative effect on the college careers of the African-American students in the study: Compared with a control group, the experiment tripled the percentage of black students who earned G.P.A.s in the top quarter of their class, and it cut in half the black-white achievement gap in G.P.A. It even had an impact on the students’ health — the black students who received the belonging message had significantly fewer doctor visits three years after the intervention.

Next, Yeager did an experiment with 600 students just entering ninth grade at three high schools in Northern California. The intervention was 25 minutes long; students sat at a terminal in the school computer lab and read scientific articles and testimonials from older students with another simple message: People change. If someone is being mean to you or excluding you, the essays explained, it was most likely a temporary thing; it wasn’t because of any permanent trait in him or you. Yeager chose ninth grade because it is well known as a particularly bad time for the onset of depression — generally, depression rates double over the transition to high school. Indeed, among the control group in Yeager’s experiment, symptoms of depression rose by 39 percent during that school year. Among the group who had received the message that people change, though, there was no significant increase in depressive symptoms. The intervention didn’t cure anyone’s depression, in other words, but it did stop the appearance of depressive symptoms during a traditionally depressive period. And it did so in just 25 minutes of treatment.

After the depression study, Yeager, Walton and two other researchers did an experiment with community-college students who were enrolled in remedial or “developmental” math classes. Education advocates have identified remedial math in community college as a particularly devastating obstacle to the college hopes of many students, especially low-income students, who disproportionately attend community college. The statistics are daunting: About two-thirds of all community-college students are placed into one or more remedial math classes, and unless they pass those classes, they can’t graduate. More than two-thirds of them don’t pass; instead, they often drop out of college altogether.

Clearly, part of the developmental-math crisis has to do with the fact that many students aren’t receiving a good-enough math education in middle or high school and are graduating from high school underprepared for college math. But Yeager and Walton and a growing number of other researchers believe that another significant part of the problem is psychological. They echo David Laude’s intuition from the early days of TIP: When you send college students the message that they’re not smart enough to be in college — and it’s hard not to get that message when you’re placed into a remedial math class as soon as you arrive on campus — those students internalize that idea about themselves.

In the experiment, 288 community-college students enrolled in developmental math were randomly assigned, at the beginning of the semester, to read one of two articles. The control group read a generic article about the brain. The treatment group read an article that laid out the scientific evidence against the entity theory of intelligence. “When people learn and practice new ways of doing algebra or statistics,” the article explained, “it can grow their brains — even if they haven’t done well in math in the past.” After reading the article, the students wrote a mentoring letter to future students explaining its key points. The whole exercise took 30 minutes, and there was no follow-up of any kind. But at the end of the semester, 20 percent of the students in the control group had dropped out of developmental math, compared with just 9 percent of the treatment group. In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost no cost, had apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by more than half. ...

Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance

The nicely-detailed New York Times article is at the bottom of this post. It seems that some school districts have realized that they are doing more harm than good with zero tolerance policies. But I liked the first article below from Break.com for calling out school administrators for their laziness--and for the great graphic.

See all posts re zero tolerance.

See also suspensions for defiance.

One School in America Just Voted To Not Be Stupid
by Ian-Fortey
June 2013

Zero tolerance is arguably the dumbest policy in the history of education and that includes things like teaching Creationism in non-religious schools. At least that can be fixed and ameliorated with the teaching of real science. You can’t really undo a suspension or expulsion and refund the time lost for a kid who got kicked out of school for bringing a plastic butter knife in his lunch. Despite how idiotic the policy is, it’s nationwide and has been in place for years. The gist of the policy is as follows – school officials will not need to worry about things like context, intention, common sense or even using brains and will instead use blanket, pointless punishments for any and all offenses that seem to fall under the purview of school policy, whether it makes sense or not.

Likely we’ve all heard stories of the heavy handed application of zero tolerance in the past. Like I said, that plastic butter knife example is true, kids have been suspended for bringing a knife in their lunch. In 2010 a 12 year old girl in new York wrote “I love my friends” on her desk in green marker. She was taken from school in handcuffs by the police. Three years earlier a 13 year old wrote “Okay” on her desk and was taken from school by police along with several other students who put stickers on a wall. A foodfight at a Chicago school ended in 25 arrests. Because 11 year olds need to be held accountable for felonious use of pudding.

To the gulag with all of them!

School officials, under the blind, deaf and remarkably dumb hand of zero tolerance have made anything that could be contextualized in some way as a crime into a full on, real crime with over the top reactions and punishments as a result. Metal bracelets have been banned from schools because they could be considered weapons. Plastic bracelets were banned because they may have had sexual meanings (which they didn’t). Rubber bands have been banned due to their use in the creation of projectile weaponry. Special education students in Florida were arrested and charged with a felony after drawing stick men being stabbed. A third grader drew a picture of his brother, a soldier in the US Army serving in Afghanistan, and was suspended because the drawing depicted a gun.

Despite how, for years, stories like these have hit the news and made every teacher, principal and school board look completely out of touch and completely stupid, no one has made a move to change policy until just now. The Suffolk school board in Suffolk, Virginia, after reviewing the case of two boys who were suspended for pretending their pencils were guns, pointing them at each other and making shooting noises, decided to get rid of zero tolerance. Now, in a stunning turn of events, school administrators will be able to decide on a case by case basis if something merits suspension or police involvement. Instead of a kid who brings a grenade to school getting the same punishment as a kid who draws a grenade, the principal can now decide to maybe not have the SWAT team show up.

Is this who we want showing up in schools?!?

Zero tolerance policies have been in US schools since 1994. That’s nearly 20 years of blanket stupidity, 20 years of education being cheapened by the implementation of idiotic and harsh extremism based on what is a fairly faulty logic to begin with – that by demonizing the smallest of crimes we prevent the bigger ones and create an orderly environment, an idea that falls apart in the face of the very nature of children and the way they act which is part of why they need to be taught the proper way to do things in the first place. Kids can be impulsive, irrational and illogical because they’re kids. They’re not mature yet, that’s kind of the point.

There isn’t actually evidence to support the use of zero tolerance in schools – its one redeeming feature, if it could be considered that – is that it doesn’t require effort. School officials get to be lazy by implementing it and not having to address any complexities at all. Studies have not indicated zero tolerance lowers drug use in schools, or violence. They offer no benefits at all beyond the thrill of reading another news story about how an idiot school board wrongly punished a child in an extreme and embarrassing way.

"Skinner!"

So one school board has abolished zero tolerance. In the past, courts have had to step in to tell school boards to chill the hell out and that they’re violating basic rights with their knee jerk reactions and foolish policies. Seems like it should be time for more school boards to get on top of this and stop treating all kids like scumbags; maybe encourage and reward the ones who came to school to learn and focus extra attention on those with problems and try to figure them out rather than just sending everyone off to the big house in fun-sized shackles.

Of course, to drop zero tolerance means more school board officials need to start thinking for themselves and who knows if that’s ever going to happen.


Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
New York Times
December 2, 2013

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.

Perhaps nowhere has the shift been more pronounced than in Broward County’s public schools. Two years ago, the school district achieved an ignominious Florida record: More students were arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.

The Florida district, the sixth largest in the nation, was far from an outlier. In the past two decades, schools around the country have seen suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses climb together with the number of police officers stationed at schools. The policy, called zero tolerance, first grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado.

But in November, Broward veered in a different direction, joining other large school districts, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver, in backing away from the get-tough approach.

Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.

These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.

In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.

Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.

“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time.”

Pressure to change has come from the Obama administration, too. Beginning in 2009, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education aggressively began to encourage schools to think twice before arresting and pushing children out of school. In some cases, as in Meridian, Miss., the federal government has sued to force change in schools.

Some view the shift as politically driven and worry that the pendulum may swing too far in the other direction. Ken Trump, a school security consultant, said that while existing policies are at times misused by school staffs and officers, the policies mostly work well, offering schools the right amount of discretion.

“It’s a political movement by civil rights organizations that have targeted school police,” Mr. Trump said. “If you politicize this on either side, it’s not going to help on the front lines.”

Supporters, though, emphasize the flexibility in these new policies and stress that they do not apply to students who commit felonies or pose a danger.

“We are not taking these tools out of the toolbox,” said Russell Skiba, a school psychology professor at Indiana University who promotes disciplinary changes. “We are saying these should be tools of last resort.”

In Broward County, the shift has shown immediate results, although it is too early to predict overall success. School-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012, school data shows.

Under the new agreement, students caught for the first time committing any of 11 nonviolent misdemeanors are no longer arrested and sent to court. Rather, they attend counseling and perform community service.

Nor do students face suspension for minor infractions. Instead, they also attend a program called Promise for three days or more. Repeat offenders get several chances to change their behavior before more punitive measures kick in.

One recent afternoon, an 18-year-old senior sat in the cafeteria at the Pine Ridge Alternative Center, where students are sent in lieu of a suspension, and spoke with a psychology graduate student on a counseling team. The girl had been caught with a small amount of marijuana in her car on her high school campus, a misdemeanor that would have led to a suspension or arrest in the past. It was the first time she had gotten in trouble at school.

“I was freaking out,” she said. Her first fear was that she would be barred from prom. Here, though, she saw the larger picture and came to view the incident as “her second chance.”

She learned about bullying and drugs and alcohol. “It was a slap in the face,” she said. “I don’t even want to smoke anymore.”

Other students here learn to manage their anger, if that is their issue. Parents are involved in the process. And counselors have helped identify problems at home including abusive situations, something that administrators said underscores how invaluable the counseling component has been for the Promise program, said Belinda Hope, the principal at Pine Ridge.

Mr. Runcie and others said the more punitive measures tended to make a bad situation worse. Suspended and expelled children would be home alone or on the street, falling behind academically. Those arrested could be stigmatized by criminal records.

“The data showed an increase in the harshness of the disciplinary practices in schools — what was once a trip to the principal’s office is now a trip to the jail cell,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group involved in the effort.

Juvenile judges were among the first to express alarm over the jump in the number of students appearing in court on misdemeanors, an increase they said is tied to the proliferation of school police officers.

“We started to see the officers as a disciplinary tool,” said Judge Elijah H. Williams of Broward County Circuit Court, a juvenile judge who said he was “no flaming liberal” but saw the need for change. “Somebody writes graffiti in a stall, O.K., you’re under arrest. A person gets caught with a marijuana cigarette, you’re under arrest.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance.

Many Dropouts Try—and Fail—to Return to School

Many Dropouts Try—and Fail—to Return to School
Many dropouts try at least once to return
By Sarah D. Sparks
Edweek.org
May 31, 2013

It takes time, patience, effort, and luck to find students who leave school and return them to the classroom. But getting them back is the easy part: Keeping them long enough to get a diploma is another thing entirely.

Jennifer Harris, the program evaluator for the high school graduation initiative in Washoe County, Nev., found that out the hard way. Back in 2008, the 63,000-student Reno-area district had a nasty shock when new federal graduation calculations showed it graduated a little more than half its incoming freshmen four years later. Eighteen of its high schools were dubbed "dropout factories" by a national research and advocacy group.

In response, the district launched a massive graduation initiative: early-warning data systems to alert principals to at-risk students, graduation advisers to keep students from leaving, and intense outreach to bring back the students who had already left.

Two years later, as the initiative was building momentum, Harris noticed a problem: "We found about 17 percent of the students who had come back dropped out again within the year," she says. "We've gotten pretty good at finding and recovering students through our re-engagement centers, but we still find it a big challenge to keep them from redropping out once we've found them. Many of the reasons that led students to disengage in the first place are still there when the students come back."

Washoe County is not alone in that struggle. There are no national figures on the number of dropouts who re-enroll, but studies of cities and districts find one-third to one-half of out-of-school youths do try at least once again to complete high school before aging out of the K-12 system.

Students often return more motivated to succeed—but then are "expected to navigate a complex maze of systems, services, and programs as they complete their education and prepare for a career," researchers from the nonprofit international consulting group FSG found. "The greater the number of challenges youths face, the harder and more confusing this navigation becomes," they wrote in a report.

Cycle of Frustration

So students drop out again. And again. And again, while their schools take financial and accountability hits every time they leave. Most state accountability systems give schools and districts little credit for re-enrolling students who have little chance of graduating within four years, or even six years for an extended graduation rate, says Andrew O. Moore, a senior fellow at the National League of Cities' Institute for Youth, Education, and Families in Washington.

Revolving Door

As a result, once a returning student leaves a dropout-recovery program, "the kid's in double jeopardy; there's no great incentive for school districts to seek these kids out," says Mark Claypool, a former social worker and the president and chief executive officer of Educational Services of America Inc., a Nashville, Tenn., for-profit that provides dropout-recovery programs in 24 states.

In one of the most comprehensive studies of returning studentsRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader, BethAnn Berliner, a research associate for the federal regional educational lab at WestEd, in San Francisco, followed the 1,352 students who dropped out of San Bernardino, Calif., public schools between 2001 and 2006. More than 30 percent returned to school at least once—a handful of dogged souls came back three times—but in the end, fewer than one in five dropouts actually made it to graduation. The rest struggled a while longer, earning a few credits before giving up on high school for good.

"There's the reality that these kids, the first time they dropped out, had probably been noteworthy in their behavior, and when they come back, they're not always welcome; they have a reputation," Claypool says. "That's a strong headwind for these kids to move against."

Boston policymakers have found that, particularly in the first year, students' return can be tenuous: "If there's a returning dropout and someone says to them, 'You're too old, why are you here?' even if you've just negotiated to have them back in the schools, the next day they're gone, that's it," says Kathy Hamilton, the youth-transitions director for the Boston Private Industry Council, a local community and workforce investment group that paired with the Boston schools to create one of the nation's first "re-engagement centers" to identify, recruit, and place out-of-school youths.

Interactive Game

It has worked with Boston schools to create rolling lists of chronically absent students for outreach every month, rather than at the end of each year, to find students in the critical first weeks after dropping out, figure out what went wrong, and help them find a way to continue high school. This year, the center is also testing the use of graduation coaches for former dropouts in two schools with high rates of multiple dropouts.

"The students just need more follow-up, more support, more help," Hamilton says. "They need someone to talk to them and tell them it's OK when things aren't working out. Our first year, we showed some improvement among those who were coached as opposed to those who are not coached."

A studyRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader by the Boston-based Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy found that among former Boston dropouts, 72 percent of those who re-enrolled through the re-engagement center were still attending a year later, compared with only 54 percent of those who came back directly to a high school.

Yet while there has been considerable progress in identifying the early warning signs that a student will drop out, Berliner and other researchers say there has been almost no research identifying when a returning student has turned the corner for graduation.

Willful Defiance Suspensions Vary Widely Among San Diego County Districts

Click once to see enlarged image.
Willful Defiance Suspensions In San Diego County School Districts, 2011-12

I agree with the California Assembly. We need to lower the drop out rate because we need kids to grow up to be productive citizens. They won't learn that on the streets.

Willful Defiance Suspensions Vary Widely Among San Diego County Districts
By Kyla Calvert
KPBS
June 3, 2013

In San Diego County, 42 percent of students suspensions in the last school year were for willful defiance. But districts vary widely in how often they used the category.

Students can be suspended in California for 24 types of offenses. They include causing physical harm, bullying and theft. But 48 percent of the state’s suspensions during the 2011-12 school year were willful defiance or disruption.

The state Assembly has passed a bill that would limit the use of willful defiance suspension to middle and high school students and only after a third offense. That bill will now be considered by the Senate.

In San Diego County, 42 percent of students suspensions in the last school year were for willful defiance. But districts vary widely in how often they used the category. It was used to justify between 50 and 55 percent of suspensions in the Carlsbad, Oceanside, Vista Unified and Fallbrook Union High School Districts.

At the other end of the spectrum, Grossmont High School District did not use willful defiance suspensions at all last year and the Chula Vista Elementary School District used the category in only 8 percent of suspensions.

Supporters of the bill to curb these suspensions argue the category is too vague and is used as a catch all for disruptive students. They point to the fact that students suspended even once are more likely to drop out as a reason to look for other discipline methods. Opponents argue that school leaders should be able to decide what works best locally.

Diane Tran, Honor Student At Texas High School, Jailed For Missing School

UPDATE: Lots of good news for Diane Tran!

Diane Tran, Texas Honor Student Jailed For Missing School, Has Contempt Order Vacated
The Huffington Post
By Timothy Stenovec
05/30/2012
Diane Tran, the Texas honor student who was jailed last week for missing too much school, will not have to worry about telling future employers or college admissions offices that she has a criminal history.

Lanny Moriarty, the judge who ordered the 17-year-old to go to jail after more than ten unexcused school absences, has set aside the contempt of court order he entered last week, according to Tran's lawyer, Brian Wice.

"She can now truthfully say that she doesn't have a criminal history," Wice told The Huffington Post by phone on Wednesday afternoon. He added that he's now going to find a lawyer to expunge the record.

Tran, a junior at Willis High School who takes AP and college level courses, works both full and part-time jobs to help support herself and two siblings, according to KHOU-11. She sometimes misses class because she's so tired from work.

"She goes from job to job from school," Devin Hill, one of Tran's classmates, told KHOU-11 last week. "She stays up until 7:00 in the morning doing her homework."

Her story resonated across the country and throughout the world. Nearly $100,000 in donations have come in from 49 states and 18 countries, according to HelpDianeTran.com, a site established in part by the Louisiana Children's Education Alliance (LCEA), a non-profit that focuses on education reform.

"We read the story and our hearts just broke thinking about what this girl had gone through," Charlie Davis, the president and founder of the LCEA, told HuffPost. "At same time we were infuriated that she'd become a victim of both the public education system and the judicial system, and we wanted to do something to help her, to show her some support."

Davis stressed that 100 percent of the money donated outside of the credit card processing fees will be donated to Tran, and said that he's hoping to give the money to the high school junior next week...



ORIGINAL POST:

A Texas judge sentenced an honor student to jail because she missed class due to exhaustion. She works one full-time job and one part-time job in addition to a heavy load of advanced classes.

What exactly is the judge trying to teach her? That she should quit working and quit eating? That she should take easy classes so she doesn't need to spend hours studying? Or perhaps she should drop out of high school?

The law was obviously designed for kids who are failing in school due to truancy. But isn't it likely to cause kids simply to drop out of school? And many kids who are never truant are graduating without minimal skills. If schools were offering a more useful and more pleasant experience, they might not have to use the threat of jail to get kids to come to school.

Ten or more unexcused absences within a six-month period is just one-and-a-half days per month. I don't see how that could severely impede the education of a smart kid. And even for a not-so-smart kid, a carrot might be better than a stick to achieve a good educational outcome.

Diane Tran, Honor Student At Texas High School, Jailed For Missing School
The Huffington Post
By Timothy Stenovec
05/27/2012

Diane Tran, a 17-year-old honor student in Texas, was forced to spend the night in jail last week after missing too many classes, KHOU-11's Sherry Williams reports.

The Willis High School junior, who helps support two siblings, has both a full time and part-time job. She said that she's often too tired to go to school.

"She goes from job to job from school," Devin Hill, one of Tran's classmates, told KHOU-11. "She stays up until 7:00 in the morning doing her homework."

In an interview with KHOU-11, Tran said she takes AP Spanish, college level algebra and dual credit English and history courses. Her parents divorced and no longer live near her, so she lives with the family that owns the wedding venue where she works on weekends.

According to Texas law, if a student has ten or more unexcused absences within a six-month period, the school district may refer the student to a juvenile court. "In such cases, resolution of the issue is entirely in the hands of the court," reads a statement on the website of the Willis Independent School District.

After being warned by a judge in April about missing too much school, Tran was arrested in court on Wednesday and required to spend the night in jail, according to the above video from KHOU-11. She has also been fined $100.

Tran's case has spread online, with dozens of news outlets across the country picking up her story. HelpDianeTran.com, a site set up by the Louisiana Children's Education Alliance in partnership with Anedot and Gatorworks, has raised over $28,000.

A petition at Change.org that calls for the judge to revoke the teen's fine and sentencing was approaching 26,000 signatures on Monday afternoon.

"This remarkable young woman doesn't deserve jail," wrote a Change.org commenter going by Letitia Gutierrez. "She deserves a medal."

San Diego High School Students Struggle To Get To School

If we want an educated populace, we should make sure kids can get to school. I think bus passes would be more worthwhile than many of the textbooks that schools are forced by law to pay for. It's a boondoggle for the textbook companies, and often the textbooks are not used by teachers. I remember that I used to have one expensive social studies text for every two or three students. This was the bizarre legal requirement that schools had to fulfill. My kids had trouble reading the books even when they could see the print. Imagine how impossible it was for them to read when they were craning their necks to see a book that was placed halfway between their desk and the desk next to them. Those books cost a lot of money and were almost useless.

In the 1960s I used to walk to San Diego High School. It was a lovely walk with no homeless people on the bridge and Victorian homes instead of high rises. Not long ago I was driving on the ramp to highway 94 East and I noticed a high rise parking structure near the school. The only kind of building that is more menacing than that is a prison.


San Diego High School Students Struggle To Get To School
By Ana Tintocalis
June 14, 2010

...Osuna doesn't own a bike or car. His only option is to take the San Diego Trolley or bus. But he can't afford a pass.

And Osuna is not alone. Hundreds of students at San Diego High School do not have a cheap, safe and reliable way to get to school. The problem is so bad that many teens are chronically tardy. Others skip school all together.

San Diego High School is surrounded by high-rises, freeways and homeless people...

[Conseulo] Manriquez recalls how one of her students was mugged while walking to school...

Manriquez decided to establish a bus pass scholarship for about 80 of her students... A few weeks later, she was flooded with applications...The majority of her students come from low-income families and could not afford a monthly transit pass. Transit passes cost students $36 every month. A bus pass scholarship for half a year saves them more than $200...

Daniel Gilbreth is transportation manager for for the school district...“It would just be too costly,” Gilbreth said...

But Manriquez believes the district's priorities are misplaced. She says it's even more costly to deny a child transportation because it contributes to low-attendance and high dropout rates...

For our own benefit we must help kids stay in school; dropouts cost us $534 million each!

Researchers Put Price Tag of Dropouts at $534 Million
Voice of San Diego
by EMILY ALPERT
April 9, 2009

Reports released today by the California Dropout Research Project estimate that the students who drop out of high school in a single year in San Diego will cost the area more than $534 million over their lifetimes. Dropouts in Chula Vista are estimated to cost nearly $137 million.

The estimates include losses in taxes from lower wages and criminal costs. The researchers also calculated that halving the dropout rate would avert 435 homicides and aggravated assaults in San Diego and 50 such crimes in Chula Vista.

The project, based at the University of California Santa Barbara, aims to draw together research on the dropout problem to educate the public. Its work has not always been lauded: Last year the group highlighted schools with high dropout rates, including a Vista charter school that specifically serves teens who have dropped out of other schools. Educators at that school and others named in the report complained last year that it depended on flawed state data and was presented with little context.

To see the reports and read more research from the California Dropout Research Project, click here.