Dropouts
« Previous EntriesSolutions to the Dropout Crisis radio webcast Tuesday, June 16
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Solutions to the Dropout Crisis radio webcast, to be broadcast live on Tuesday, June 16, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. (12:30 PDT)
Mentoring is one of the most effective and certainly the most economical dropout prevention strategies. But in order to have positive effects, mentoring needs to incorporate the right elements, i.e., The Elements of Effective Practice.
Kate Schineller, VP of MENTOR, will present a full program about mentoring, including who needs mentors; what the research says; and program design and planning. She will then introduce listeners to a successful mentoring program for children of prisoners, the Caregiver’s Choice Project, a demonstration project of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and administrated by her organization, MENTOR.
Materials including the slide show/PowerPoint are available online now! On the day of the broadcast, go to http://www.dropoutprevention.org/webcast and select this program. You may participate live and call in questions of our guest. If you are unable to join us on the 16th, listen to the archived version or subscribe to our program on Itunes.
Any questions, contact ndpc@clemson.edu.
Topics: Dropouts, Recommended Resources, Resources for Mentor, Upcoming Events | No Comments »
Kids Coming and Going
By asdspec | Saturday, April 11th, 2009
By Laura Reasoner Jones
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It’s Thursday morning and I glance at my open e-mail screen as I buzz by my desk in the computer lab. And there it is again, the fourth time this week. Subject line: “Students coming/leaving.”
Apprehensive, I stop to open and read it. It’s Christina from Michelle’s class. One of my all-time favorite lab-lunch kids. I scroll down to see that she is not only leaving, but she has left. Her family has moved and she is gone without saying goodbye.
I read down the rest of the e-mail. Two students are coming—a boy into 4th grade from Honduras with the ELL level of 1, meaning no English at all, and his sister into kindergarten, also with no English. I will need to watch for them—to help them at the bus and in the lab.
But I can’t get past Christina. She was just in here on Tuesday, not a word said about leaving, happy and bouncy as usual. When she left she saved her work on the server, to take up again tomorrow at our regular “come to my lab for lunch” get together. Did she not know? I feel burned, and I can only imagine how she feels. This is Eduardo and Biriva and Xavier all over again. Here one day and gone the next—with no warning or opportunity for farewell.
I catch Michelle, Christina’s teacher, in the hallway, and she looks the way I feel—stunned, sad. She didn’t know Christina was leaving, either. She keeps saying, “I have all of her stuff…her desk…her projects.” She is almost in tears.
If this were a single happening, we could comfort each other, but it happens every week, year in and year out. We can hardly recover from one loss before the next one comes along.
My school has a student mobility rate of close to 40 percent, meaning kids are coming and leaving daily. The county has a whole has a mobility rate of around 16 percent. Here on the page, these numbers are meaningless, but when you add faces to the numbers, it means that close to half the students we’ve cared for since September won’t be with us in the spring. And by the end of the year, their assigned desks may have been the temporary residencies of two or more other little bodies.
Demographics Don’t Tell This Story
This is hard. It is hard for the kids, both the ones leaving and the ones staying. And it is also hard for the teachers. Feelings of loss are not something measured in the demographic data. Gender, race, ELL, socio-economic level—these can be measured. But the emotional toll of student mobility on both teachers and students isn’t quantifiable or subject to analysis by statisticians.
After Christmas, Eduardo, a student I wrote about last year, dropped in before our shared bus duty to tell me that his family had bought a house. This is one of the few good things about the terrible state of the economy—families who can manage to stay employed are finally able to buy houses in this severely depressed market. I congratulated him and plied him for details. He told me more about it, emphasizing he would get his own bedroom. But he never once mentioned where the new house was.
We spent January doing our usual geeky lab things before and after school and during lunch, without another word about the house. The last afternoon before the semester break, I reported for bus duty to find that Eduardo, our patrol captain extraordinaire, was absent. We searched the crowds of kids and found a substitute holding Eduardo’s clipboard. She said Eduardo had asked her to be the captain for the afternoon. I stopped in the office after buses were gone to find the attendance assistant sending the dreaded e-mail with Eduardo’s name in it. His family had moved out of the county, and he could not bring himself to say goodbye.
Teachers gathered in the hallway as the news spread—on some level, you would have thought he had died. They shared stories of his entrance into kindergarten, fresh from Mexico with no English and no way to communicate other than a big smile. “We are sad,” I kept thinking. “We are mourning him.”
Teaching Is About Relationships
You say, “Why is she whining about this? Children come and go—that is the nature of the job.” Yes, I agree. But as we all know, teaching is much more than imparting content knowledge; it is about building relationships. And what is the effect of high transiency on teachers and relationship-building?
Over time, all of us who work in schools come to learn that September means hello and June means goodbye. We were conditioned to this when we were children and are reinforced now in our profession. But that cycle is interrupted weekly at my school, and it creates different kinds of adaptations—some healthy, and some not.
I see the young teachers throw themselves into the lives of these children, visiting families, investing heart and soul, and then being devastated as a child leaves without warning—without that last hug or handshake and words of farewell. It is a little death. And then I see these teachers start to build walls around themselves, putting a little less of their hearts into their kids so that they are less exposed each time. At the end, some are completely detached. That is a common feeling among adults in schools like mine.
But I also see teachers who have managed to find a balance between investing in children and minimizing the pain of constant loss. This is the rare teacher in my school, but they are here. I think we would all like to get to that place.
I don’t know that I have quite recovered from the unexpected moves of so many of my kids. They were here and now they are gone and I miss them. I would love to know how they turn out, and if they remember what we all did together, and if it made a difference. I would have liked a proper goodbye—to say or do something that would leave them and me with a talisman of the fun and learning we did together.
Teachers in buildings like ours need to find a way to continue to make those all-important personal connections with our students without sacrificing our own core of emotional stability—so that their time with us is rich and rewarding, and they leave with a memory of caring teachers that will positively color their next school experience.
Maybe that is my problem most of all—what will they find in the next school? Will the teachers care about them the way I did? Will they see the gifts we saw? Will the move have a negative effect on my kids’ perception of school, so that they are not as willing to expose themselves to the risks of learning?
Maybe the answer is to not anticipate the losses, but to look on each day with kids as possibly the last day you will see them and to make that precious time between teacher and student as meaningful as possible.
If I can do that each night—look myself in the eye and know that I did my very best with the kids I was privileged to be with today—then perhaps I will find the balance I need.
Laura Reasoner Jones is a school-based technology specialist in a northern Virginia elementary school. She is National Board-certified in early childhood special education and state-certified in school library media.
Topics: Dropouts, Relationships | No Comments »
Reasons for drop out rates
By Amanda Adkinson | Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
I have been trying to figure this whole thing out. I have always prided myself on being pretty computer savvy but this class has stumped me! I think I have figured it out now so I am sorry for the late posting!
I am going to cut and paste what I wrote in my journal, which is what I think I am supposed to do. Yeah?
Here is my first post:
To me someone who does not finish school can look like a lot of different things. I have known people throughout my life who have dropped out of high school who are very, very different from one another and their reasons for not finishing school also differed.
For this assignment I really had to think of what I thought a high school drop out would look like. Maybe a girl, age 17 who is more interested in her older boyfriend who is not in high school than she is in her grades. She is probably slightly lower middle class and feels school is boring, not for her. She feels she can make more money by working, even though she most likely does not have steady employment. This of course is what I am thinking of when I think of some of the recent girls I have met who did not finish high school.
There are a variety of reasons people do not finish high school, some of those reasons could include:
Pregnancy
Death in the family
Ill family member
Abusive home
Working to help provide
Made fun of in school, bullied.
Not feeling challenged
Feeling bored, there is something better to do.
Having friends, boyfriends or girlfriends who do not attend school.
Having parents who do not enforce rules.
Not having friends in school.
Parents divorcing.
Having to move away, to a different school.
Not fitting in.
There are probably several more reasons people do not finish school. I am hoping this class gives me some insights into the facts, information and numbers associated with high school drop out rates in our area.
Topics: Dropouts | No Comments »
Dropout rate affects economic development
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Monday, April 6th, 2009
One more answer to the question Why Are We Doing This? Why are we offering a course to teachers and mentors to teach skills and understandings that help keep kids in school?
This article by Bobby L. Hickman, is from the website, Business to Business. It is about the economic impact of dropouts on the Georgia economy – but, it is easy to see that the bottom line is the same in Oregon, and all around the country. When a kid drops out of school, the costs are like a stone thrown into water – they just keep on expanding, beyond one person, one family, one neighborhood, to affect our entire economy.
________________________
“If you’re not convinced education has a dramatic effect on economic development and growth, you haven’t met Dr. Steve Dolinger. As president of the non-profit Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (GPEE), he travels around the state talking to chambers of commerce, civic clubs and other community leaders about the economics of education. He presents sobering statistics detailing how the high-school dropout rate has an $18 billion annual economic impact on Georgia.
What sort of reaction does he get?
“Usually it’s a little bit of a wake-up call,” Dolinger says. “They’ll know some of the data. They know the graduation rate is getting better but it’s not where we want it. They know SAT scores are improving but still not where they need to be.”
But when GPEE starts tying dollar values to those statistics, it’s often an eye-opening discussion. According to a Georgia Southern study, in 2005, the percentage of Georgians age 25 and older who had completed high school was 82.8 percent. The national average was 84.2 percent.
Other studies indicate if the number of 20-year-old high-school dropouts were cut in half, the federal government would reap $45 billion in extra tax revenues and reduced costs for public health, crime and justice, and welfare.
The Georgia high school graduation rate improved from 65 percent in 2004 to 72 percent in 2007. But Dolinger says that number represents 123,275 students over the past four years who entered ninth grade but did not graduate from high school.
He says high school non-completion “affects so many things. It increases criminal activity, and adds to the costs of prison and welfare. They have lower lifetime earnings, which reduces their buying power, lowers tax revenues for governments and reduces economic growth. There’s also decreased health status, more criminal activity, higher rates of teen pregnancy and single motherhood – just higher costs all around.”
Aside from the immediate impact, the education system also has a direct effect on future economic growth. ….”
To see the entire article, go to http://www.btobmagazine.com/Articles/2008/April/eco_dev_beat.html
Topics: Drop Out Rate, Dropouts | No Comments »
Reasons for dropping out
By jmbrew | Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
I believe students are dropping out for the following reasons: financial hardship, lack of interest, racial tension, support (home, community, school), and poor grades.
I noticed drugs were mentioned in another posting and self-perception that were different from my reasons. The similarities I read in other postings were race, support (home, community, and school).
Topics: Dropouts, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Reasons for dropping out
By katelmoore | Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
I teach primarily freshmen at an inner Portland high school. I think the 5 top reasons kids drop out in my district are:
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Don’t like school, think it’s pointless
- Have fallen behind, not because of lack of ability but often because of lack of attendance
- Lack of actual parental support for education (not just saying the words)
- Family economic problems lead to upheaval and changing schools
- Drugs or alcohol problems, personally or with family
Topics: Dropouts, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Why are we doing this?
By Tobi Kibel Piatek | Monday, March 30th, 2009
Welcome Spring 2009 class.
Why should you take this course? Why should you learn to build relationships with kids at risk? Who are these kids? Who else cares? How can I know?
Almost every time I listen to the news, or read online, the subject of the dropout rate keeps popping up. Today I listened to a discussion of the candidate’s views and ideas for reducing the drop out rate among Hispanics (the highest of any ethnic group.) Yesterday I mentioned in this blog that Fox News considers teen dropout rates one of the important issues facing America today.
Anytime No Child Left Behind is mentioned, the dropout rate is soon part of the conversation. There are articles lately arguing different ways to calculate the dropout rate, as well as mention of the dropout rate as a key indicator of a school’s success in different areas.
The dropout rate is politics, its economics, it is a social issue and an educational one. The dropout rate in our country is an indicator of other problems and other issues. And though there is a lot of conversation about how to solve this problem, so far, we know that one strategy has had a positive impact – forming better relationships – with kids, with their families and their communities. That’s why we offer this course.
My Challenge to You - Start noticing what the media says about dropouts.
Let’s track this trend and gather information together. Use this post as a starting point that you can use to submit links to, or quotes from any articles or materials in any medium that you come across related to the dropout rate.
Let’s collect opinions, points of view, statistics and strategies.
My husband has an expression, “when you are hungry, all you see is bakeries.” My challenge to you is … when you are aware of a new major concept – the dropout rate, kids at risk, and struggling schools, what do YOU notice all around you?
Please share.
Topics: Drop Out Rate, Dropouts | 3 Comments »
warning signs
By kristendyan | Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
a list i compiled … i know there are probably many many more issues that contribute to dropping out.
warning signs:
- high risk peer group
- risky behavior
- typically low achievement
- retention- being over the typical age for the grade one is in
- poor attendance
- low educational expectations, from both individual and family
- low socioeconomic status
- family moves a lot
- family having little school contact
- learning disabilities
- emotional disturbance
- lack of effort
- does not finish assignments
- limited extracurricular participation
- misbehavior
- low education level of parents
- family issues
- siblings who have dropped out
- absenteeism
- being uprepared for class
- trouble setting goals
- substance abuse
- feels unsafe
- being a parent, or responsible for parenting siblings
- works a lot
Topics: Dropouts, Uncategorized | No Comments »
reasons for dropping out
By kristendyan | Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
i am working with high school students (and soon middle school students), in the vancouver/camas/battleground/ridgefield area.
based on what i hear the students i am working with say, there are NUMEROUS reasons for kids dropping out in this area, but some of the ones i hear most:
1. students and/or their families do not see the value in education. it is not as much of a priority as working for money, caring for family members, etc. some students don’t receive the support they need from their family; some students live on their own so they have to work 40+ hours a week, and have no energy left for school; many students do not plan on attending college, therefore don’t think a high school diploma is necessary for success; other students recognize that some careers do not require a high school diploma, and some of these fields are avenues for making enough money to survive.
2. truancy/excessive absences. once a student misses too many school days, it becomes almost impossible to catch up. while some students miss school because they don’t care for it, others have more valid reasons for missing school- needing to work, sickness, pregnancy, caring for family members, etc.
3. ‘typical’ school does not meet their needs. every student learns differently and has different needs when it comes to receiviing, retaining and reflecting information. some students come from schools or classrooms where this is not recognized or explored. they have trouble learning in these situations and eventually give up. in essence, some students just get ‘lost’ in the system.
4. some students get caught up in risky behavior- drugs, alcohol, partying- and school becomes less and less of a priority. this becomes extremely dangerous for students who do not have the support of anyone who truly values education.
5. students feel like nobody cares or notices if they aren’t in school. they find community outside of school. their need for acceptance is not met in school, so they find it elsewhere, and often replace school with these communities or groups.
Topics: Drop Out Rate, Dropouts | No Comments »
thoughts on dropping out ….
By kristendyan | Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
schools provide dropout statistics, but i am finding (through my work with dropout prevention and retention programs), that these numbers are not always accurate. sometimes communication between districts is limited, so if a student moves and does not notify his/her previous school, they are seen in the data as a dropout. in situations like these, dropout numbers may be larger than actual. however, it seems some schools find ways to reduce the dropout data as well. i’ve done quite a bit of research on alternative high schools in my area. some of them have excellent programs. it seems that sometimes, though, schools will send students who are doing poorly straight to the alternative school before really evaluating their needs and the causes for their struggling. for some students, an alternative school is a great fit, but for others, the issues at the root of their problems are too big to be fixed easily by switching schools. by quickly sending students who are struggling to another school, schools reduce their dropout data, but are they really helping all these students in the ways they need help?
in my research, i find that truancy (excessive unexcused absences) is the number one predictor for dropping out. i think this is connected to many other issues, such as lack of parental involvement, lack of motivation for or enjoyment of school, lack of accountability …. all these issues need to be explored in the lives of students who are at risk of dropping out, and the most fitting alternatives explored for each individual.
Topics: Dropouts | No Comments »
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