Dropout Prevention – Part I

It was a retired teacher, and fellow activist, who first whispered to me that the schools experimented on children.  At the time this went right over my head since I associated the notion of experiments with Pavlov’s stimulus/response work where he trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell or counting mutations in fruit flies.  As I learned more about how the whole realm of academics was being implemented under OBE, however, I realized that experimentation could also be set up as a lack of stimulation/response situation.  Learning is brilliantly stimulating for the brain, not just because kids love to learn, but because the work of learning forms and strengthens multiple neural pathways.  I often tell my students that doing math - with paper and pencil - is like lifting weights with the brain.  In the absence of effective teaching, learning will not occur, and when this is coupled with constantly assessing these untaught skills, a large number of students will begin to turn away.  It becomes too painful to continue caring about academic achievement when that achievement is impossible.   It is simply in self-defense that many children will respond, quite predictably, by gradually dropping out of the environment causing the pain.  And boredom – progressive de-education is very, very boring.

Then we got hold of the hilariously titled Graduation Enhancement/Dropout Prevention plan books for four counties in Florida – Pasco, Hillsborough, Pinellas and Sarasota.  By “we”, I mean the education group IVBE (Independent Voices for Better Education) – IVBE.org.  At one of our first gatherings, the more experienced members of this group taught all the bewildered parents that when we wanted any kind of information from the schools, we needed: the exact wording of the title and any other print on the cover; the color of the cover; whether it was hardback or soft; the dimensions of the document or book, including length, width and height; the number of pages; how it was bound – and it might still be impossible to get what we asked for without delay or cost.  All that for information that we as parents and taxpayers had bought and paid for.   “Follow the money” has always been one of IVBE's credos whenever we had a question about the school system’s aberrant behavior, but it was still incredibly shocking to see everything down in black and white.  By page 6 of Pasco’s book (1993-1994), it was clear that all the changes going on under the guise of “school improvement” would be producing the criteria for these new programs.

There are three categories of dropout factors: school related, family factors and personal factors.

·        I was surprised that the first item under "school related" is absenteeism/truancy/frequent tardiness because this was during the time that parents were being arrested and fined, if not worse, when their kids didn’t make it to school often enough.  The E’s must feel more responsible for this behavior than they are willing to admit. 

·        With the new grading system implemented simultaneously, as well as next to no homework, parents found it very difficult to keep up with how their kids were doing, but the teachers all knew exactly what was going on in that regard.  I had one teacher tell me he kept two separate grading books, one where all the grades were “S” for Satisfactory to keep the administration happy, and another where he recorded the actual grades his students were earning on tests and class work.  It was the “S’s” that were making it home.  When I explained to a different teacher that I had seen my son’s test grades go from A’s to C’s but he still got an “S” on his report card, she told me I wasn’t supposed to see those test scores!

·        Even brilliant children can be, and were, dumbed down using the methods implemented during the days of Blueprint 2000/OBE.

·        Reading, writing, arithmetic – Whole Language; no grammar taught and no writing errors corrected; confusing, inefficient computation methods, out of sequence skills, calculators – done, done & done.

·        Verbal deficiency – this could be a couple things.  Kids with trouble pronouncing words won’t be corrected.  It’s supposed to be bad for their self-esteem - at least until they get labeled and put into a speech program (more money that way), and half the time I wonder what the heck they do in there, since there’s rarely any improvement.  This could also be a reference to the lack of explicit vocabulary instruction – the students were in fact told to skip over words they didn’t know at the exact same time they were told to try to guess at the meaning of unknown words from “context”.

·        Both the inability to tolerate structured activities and disruptive classroom behavior are actively encouraged by classrooms where the kids are actually supposed to be constantly milling around from group to group or station to station.  Staying still and focusing on an academic task takes practice, with the periods of on-task time lengthening in incremental stages.  I’m not convinced that little boys can’t learn to sit still – they did it for centuries.

·        How to limit participation in extra-curricular activities?  Make it very expensive.  Parents are told repeatedly that one way to keep their increasingly disinterested children in school is to get them involved in sports or band, etc.  The poor kids can’t afford it and are therefore more likely to drop out.

The rest of the criteria naturally follows.  In following posts, I’d like to go into more detail about how that new grading system worked to obscure what was going on achievement-wise as well as how the listed family factors figured into it.  Plus, of course, there will be the description of the wonderful Dropout Programs themselves, as outlined in the system’s very own words.  Please let me know if you have any questions.