Getting Young People to Do the Right Thing

A COLLEAGUE at ECS, whose earliest years were spent a U.S. Air Force base in Germany, recalls that the first book he ever heard read to him as a child is Der Strummelpeter, a collection of German morality tales for children. In this book, boys who suck their thumbs have the offending digit unceremoniously dispatched by the tailor's scissors. Children who don't finish their dinner starve to death. And many, many other amusing anecdotes. You get the picture. point is, it's amazing the lengths to which people will go to get their children to do the right thing. And in the world of education policy, though we're not typically reading Der Strummelpeter to high school kids, policy makers over the last 30 years or so have been adopting one approach after another in an attempt to keep young people from making one of the biggest mistakes of their lives--dropping out of school. As many readers know, the efforts of the past have unfortunately been largely cookie-cutter policies and programs that have met with limited success. Recently, however, awakened by the more accurate graduation data that result from better methods of tracking who's leaving school (part of the larger recent push for general high school reform), researchers, policy makers, and even Oprah have taken a second look at the factors that lead students to drop out and are undertaking efforts that might be more likely to keep kids from making a decision with potentially dire consequences. One of my favorite reports to have come out this year is a white paper this topic by Craig Jerald for Achieve, Inc., and Jobs for the Future. Titled Identifying Potential Dropouts: Key Lessons for Building an Early Warning Data System, it synthesizes recent research and separates the myths from the facts about what contributes to young people's decision to say so long to the schoolhouse. Jerald's study notes that, contrary to what many believe, student demographics don't necessarily dictate who will stay in school and who will leave. Academic performance and engagement in school carry a great deal of weight in student decisions whether or not to drop Especially in urban districts, where high proportions of students have demographic risk factors, Jerald points out, very low academic performance and educational engagement can help discriminate the ones most likely to be the path to dropping out. Though risk factors themselves can't tell us who will tough it out through high school and who will leave, research points to one risk factor that appears to play a significant role in determining who graduates from high school. The On-Track Indicator as a Predictor of High School Graduation, another favorite study of mine, suggests that dropout prevention efforts should recognize the importance of the freshman year of high school. This 2005 paper from the Consortium Chicago School Research relates the findings of a study of high school completion rates among Chicago Public School students. researchers found that students who were on at the end of grade 9--by the researchers' definition, those who had earned enough credits to go to grade 10 and had failed no more than one semester in a core subject--were substantially less likely to drop out than their peers who did not meet one (or both) of the on-track criteria. Interestingly, the researchers also found that many students who came to high school with low test scores were track in grade 9 and finished high school in four years and that some students with good test scores in the middle grades did not make a successful transition transition to high school and ended up off track. Thus performance before high school is not a solid indicator of who's going to be walking across the stage to accept a sheepskin four years later. A 2006 report goes straight to the source. The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts is made up of the findings from focus groups of recent dropouts the reasons they dropped out and what would have made them stay in school. …