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Economic Stimulus: High School Diplomas
The Alliance for Excellent Education has a new brief out documenting the costs of high school dropouts, and it has some intriguing statistics about the Carolinas. For instance, if the nearly 46,700 students who didn't graduate from N.C. high schools in 2009 had gotten that diploma, the state could have benefitted from more than $12 billion in income they would receive over their lifetime.
Not only that, North Carolina would save more than $491.6 million in health care costs over the lifetimes of each class of dropouts had they earned their diplomas. If North Carolina’s high schools graduated all of their students ready for college, the state would save almost $97.4 million a year in community college remediation costs and lost earnings. Also, North Carolina’s Economy would see a combination of crime-related savings and additional revenue of about $233 million each year if the male high school graduation rate increased by just 5 percent.
South Carolina had fewer dropouts this, about 21,900 students, with lost lifetime earnings of nearly $5.7 billion. But the cost of dropouts is still significant. South Carolina would save more than $320.1 million in health care costs over the lifetimes of each class of dropouts had they earned their diplomas. If South Carolina’s high schools graduated all of their students ready for college, the state would save almost $54.3 million a year in community college remediation costs and lost earnings. And South Carolina’s economy would see a combination of crime-related savings and additional revenue of about $151 million each year if the male high school graduation rate increased by just 5 percent.
“As these findings show, the best economic stimulus is a high school diploma,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “Given the tremendous financial drag these dropouts will have on North Carolina’s economy, it is imperative that the state, as well as the Federal Government, focus attention on students most at risk of dropping out if it is to achieve long-term economic stability. In an Information Age economy, Education is the main currency.”
Nationwide, more than seven thousand students become dropouts every school day. Annually, that adds up to almost 1.3 million students who will not graduate from high school with their peers as scheduled.“Unless America’s high schools significantly improve their graduation rates,” Wise noted, “nearly 13 million students will drop out over the next decade with a massive loss to the nation of $3 trillion.”
Sounds like a wake-up call, doesn't it?
"The High Cost of High School Dropouts: What the Nation Pays for Inadequate High Schools" is available at http://www.all4ed.org/files/HighCost.pdf. Info about the high school dropout crisis in individual states is at http://www.all4ed.org/about_the_crisis/schools/state_cards.
Dropout rate declines almost 17% in L.A. schools
The dropout rate in the Los Angeles Unified School District declined almost 17% -- welcome news in a school system beleaguered by budget cuts and ongoing battles over future reforms.
The dropout rate for the 2007-08 school year came in at 26.4%, down from 31.7% for the previous year and among the largest improvements in the state. L.A. Unified still trails all other large urban school systems in California except Oakland Unified.
"We're starting to see the results of three years of work," said Debra Duardo, a onetime dropout who began the district's dropout-prevention unit. For one thing, there were 16,000 duplicate student records that, in effect, inflated the dropout rate. More important, school teams better coordinated diffuse services, she said, "to identify students at risk and decide who's working with a student and who's contacting the parents."
District officials also credited the conversion of large high schools into clusters of smaller academies, with the goal of quickly intervening to help students at risk of failure.
At South Gate High School, which has about 3,300 students, the dropout rate fell 1.5 percentage points to 20% while graduation rates jumped nearly 15 points to almost 83%.
Six-year Principal Patrick Moretta, who recently retired, attributed gains to factors including increased teacher support, a mandatory study hall for ninth- and 10th-graders, and diversion of more funding to the classroom. Athletics sometimes had to take a back seat, he said, with practices no longer held during school hours so coaches and students could devote more time to schoolwork.
Overall, the district's graduation rate rose 7.9% to 72.4%.
Both the graduation and dropout rates are approximations. The dropout rate is a four-year estimate based on two years of data that, for the first time, tracks individual students. But it can't tabulate dropouts who are listed as having left a California public school for another school. The graduation rate uses four years of data, but does not yet track individuals. L.A. Unified provided the data in advance of its official state release.
Among the results: Hollywood High cut its dropout rate nearly in half from 36.3% to 18.8%. Birmingham High in the San Fernando Valley increased its graduation rate from 77% to 91.1%. On the other hand, Jefferson High had an improved but still poor graduation rate of 48.6%. Ditto for the Santee Educational Complex, with a dropout rate of 41.2%.
These results burnish the record of former Supt. David L. Brewer, who was forced out in December although test scores rose. Brewer, reached in Orlando, Fla., credited Duardo as well as district principals and teachers who accepted responsibility for taking on the dropout problem.
"I kept telling people we were turning the corner," he said.
Whether these gains will be sustained could depend on how well the school system adjusts to reduced resources in the wake of state budget woes. The number of counselors taking part in the district's Diploma Project, for example, has been cut in half.
"I hope that program survived," Brewer said, "because it really focused on kids."
Urban High School's rare feat: No dropouts!
(Camden, N.J., school built around student's passions, community project)
CAMDEN, N.J. - Angelo Drummond wears a pressed white shirt and a red power tie for his two-hour presentation to his harshest critics — a panel of fellow students at Camden's MetEast High School.
The stocky 17-year-old lays out his intention to study through the summer to bring up his scores on the SAT and New Jersey's high school graduation exam. He also explains his senior-year project to plan a lounge where teenagers can hang out, study and avoid the trouble that snags so many in his city.
His peers tell the junior he needs to get his timeline together to apply for grants for the lounge, that he might need to scale back his ambitions for the project, and that he needs to learn more about how nonprofit organizations get grants.
It's an extraordinary display of wisdom for students in a city where dropout rates are consistently among New Jersey's highest and test scores are among the lowest.
Neither is the case at MetEast, which graduated its first class of seniors on Friday.
It opened in 2005 as a laboratory for education in a city where the schools are part of an entanglement of problems.
It's one of about 60 schools nationwide established with the help of Big Picture Learning, a nonprofit with offices in San Diego and Providence, R.I. Three Big Picture schools are scheduled to open in Newark this fall.
Advisers not teachers
The schools are small and very different from traditional schools. MetEast has just over 100 students — less than one-tenth the enrollment at each of the city's comprehensive high schools. The educators are called "advisers," not teachers, and they advise the same group of students all four years.
Classes are built around the idea that students will learn by following their passions. Students do internships. Graduation requirements include a senior project with the aim of doing some good for the community.
And four times a year, every student makes a presentation to a panel that includes students and adults from outside the school.
That's what put a confident Angelo Drummond put behind a lectern, explaining how he's come to know himself better by studying daily for the SAT. "This is something I'm very proud of because I've never stuck with something," he says.
Besides talking about their progress, the students also must moderate a discussion of a topic they chose. Drummond's topic is a gang shooting that happened days earlier in Trenton.
It's not esoteric for the audience. Drummond's peers talk about the gang members they know.
"Our students have the same issues, dilemmas and challenges as students at the larger high schools," says principal Timothy Jenkins. The graduating class includes students who became pregnant or homeless but still made it through school.
All 30 students who began as freshman at MetEast four years ago have graduated from high school somewhere, including a handful that have moved or transferred, Jenkins says.
That's a contrast to what happens in the city's two traditional high schools.
According to state Education Department figures, nearly 1 in 7 Camden High students dropped out in the 2007-08 school year. At Woodrow Wilson High, it was almost 1 in 11. Critics say those dropout rates are understated, but still, both schools were among the 20 in the state with the highest dropout rates.
All 28 students graduating from MetEast have been accepted to at least one college. Jenkins expects most of them to attend in the fall.
Learning Communities
Denasia Mixson, for example, plans to study criminal justice at Rowan University. She says she wanted to be a teacher until an internship in education soured her on the idea. Then, she interned in law enforcement, which made her want to become a homicide detective in her hometown.
Her big senior research paper is on what went wrong in the city that was once a major manufacturing hub. Her theory: the long industrial decline over the last several decades, along with the arrival of crack dealing in the 1980s.
The people who study Camden believe a major turnaround is possible only by improving the schools.
To accomplish that, the school district — like many across the country — is focusing on building small "learning communities" by breaking up bigger institutions. The Big Picture schools are a radical version of that.
In Camden, there's evidence that the concept is working.
The city's two magnet schools — one focuses on health careers, the other on the arts — have strong records.
But MetEast is different because its curriculum is further from the traditional and because it's not a magnet school.
And unlike charter schools that have sprung up in Camden during the last decade, MetEast is run by the city's school district.
Potential Model
Students don't need to meet any academic standards to get in, though they and their families do have to commit to follow the unusual model. Spots are filled through a lottery.
The school district sees MetEast as a model.
"They would not have thrived in the comprehensive high schools," says school district spokesman Bart Leff. "But they are thriving at MetEast."
During Drummond's presentation, adviser Keinan Thompson congratulates him for starting to take school seriously.
And Heidi Segall Levy, a project manager at Philadelphia's Community Design Collaborative, where Drummond is interning, says she'll work with him to focus his ideas for the teen lounge.
But it's the assessment from Mixson, the aspiring detective, that impresses Drummond. "You did a good job," she tells him. "You surprised me."
"It surprises me that you said that," he says, beaming.
High School Dropout Crisis Threatens U.S. Economic Growth and Competiveness, Witnesses Tell House Panel
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. high school dropout crisis poses one of the greatest threats to the nation’s economic growth and competitiveness and must be addressed, witnesses told the House Education and Labor Committee today. Witnesses urged Congress to explore legislative solutions as quickly as possible.
“The crisis we’re seeing in our nation’s high schools is real, it’s urgent, and it must be fixed,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chair of the committee. “It’s become increasingly clear that addressing this dropout crisis is one of the most important things we can do to turn our economy around and regain our competitive footing for good. We have a moral and economic obligation to ensure that, at a minimum, every student in this country can graduate high school prepared to succeed in college or the workforce. Our intent is to address this problem in this Congress in the most comprehensive way possible.”
Nationwide, 7,000 students drop out every day and only about 70 percent of students graduate from high school with a regular high school diploma. Two thousand high schools in the U.S. produce more than half of all dropouts and a recent study suggests that in the 50 largest cities, only 53 percent of students graduate on time. Research shows that poor and minority children attend these so-called “dropout factories” – the 2,000 schools that produce more than 50 percent of our nation’s dropouts – at significantly higher rates.
Studies also highlight the financial impact of the nation’s dropout rates. A recent report by the McKinsey Corporation showed that if minority student performance had reached white students by 1998, the GDP in 2009 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher – or approximately 2 to 4 percent of GDP. The report also says the achievement gaps in this country are the same as having “a permanent national recession.
“Currently this Congress is grappling with massive economic problems. But the enormous cost of bailing out the banks, financial institutions, the auto industry, and AIG is still less than the economic cost of just five years of dropouts in the United States,” said Bob Wise, president, Alliance for Excellent Education and the former Governor of West Virginia. “That is why I believe that the ultimate economic stimulus package is a diploma.”
Cutting the dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in new federal tax revenues or cost savings, according to a recent report by Columbia University’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 90 percent of new high-growth, high-wage jobs will require some level of postsecondary education.
Cutting the dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in new federal tax revenues or cost savings, according to a recent report by Columbia University’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 90 percent of new high-growth, high-wage jobs will require some level of postsecondary education.
“Simply put, the world has changed and there is no work for high school dropouts,” said Dr. Robert Balfanz, Ph. D, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University. “To meet its graduation challenge, the nation must find a solution for its dropout factories.”
Balfanz recent research findings show “it is often possible to identify as early as sixth grade up to half of the students who, absent effective interventions, will not graduate, and up to 80 percent by the ninth grade.”
Witnesses also presented data which shows African-America, Latino, American Indian and Alaska Native high school students have a far lower chance of graduating on time with a regular diploma.
“I echo the likes of Secretary Duncan and other education leaders when I say that education is the most important American civil rights issue of the 21st century,” said Michael Wotorson, executive director of the Campaign for High School Equity. “The one consistency in our education system is in our high schools that fail to provide students of color and youth from low-income neighborhoods with the high-quality education they need to succeed in college and in the modern workplace.”
Witnesses all agreed that a common core of rigorous internationally benchmarked standards will help ensure all students graduate career and college ready.
“We do not have to live in a country where three out of 10 students do not graduate on time, and where on-time graduation for minority students is a 50-50 proposition,” said Marguerite Kondracke, President and CEO of America’s Promise Alliance. “We have solutions on the ground, and legislative proposals that will bring them to scale.”
Other witnesses called for reforms that to make schools and teachers more accountable to their students.
Scott Gordon, the CEO of Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, where 47 percent of the city’s public school first graders graduate from high school, discussed strategies that help his school turn around high dropout rates and low performance. The average scores for Mastery students increased 35 points per grade in every subject and violence decreased by 85 percent. The schools’ turnover rates dropped a third.
He urged teachers to take more responsibility for the outcomes of their students, and urged administrators and state officials to reward teachers accordingly.
“The structure of the turnarounds required that Mastery continue operating as a neighborhood schools and enroll all of the students currently attending. So, in many ways these turnaround schools are perfect controlled experiments on school reform,” said Gordon. “The same students, the same neighborhood, the same building – the only variable that changed was the adults.”
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Sources: Charlotte Observer, LA Times, News & Observer, MSNBC, Cato Institute, Alliance For Excellent Education, TIME, WRAL, Whitehouse.gov, ERIC Digest, US Dept of Ed.,US Committee on Education & Labor, Wake Ed, Wikipedia, Huffington Post, Youtube, Google Maps
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