Drop-Out Prevention Programs - The Family Factors

When schools are in their dumbing down mode, they will be simultaneously shifting the blame for the results to someone or something else.  We were hearing an awful lot about dysfunctional families and at-risk children back when all the Outcome Based changes in the schools were coming down.  These unidentified, horrible families were blamed for everything from why students never had homework to why kids with head lice weren’t sent home.  Students were supposedly not learning to read because the dysfunctional parents weren’t reading to them every night.  The kids were flunking their math tests because the dysfunctional parents weren’t helping them with their homework – this would be the same “homework” that - at that time - few of them were getting.  It became such a pervasive theme that I finally asked a school shrink neighbor of mine for her definition of parents most likely to have at-risk students.  Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Two-income families.”

And here I was expecting the answer to be “Heroin addicts” or something.

Many different family structures, however, will have difficulty when schools stop teaching.  Two-income families have two parents getting home around 6 pm and squeezing meals, housework, laundry, activities, and sometimes more work, etc. into the 2-3 hours before their children’s bed time.  It is very hard for these families to also manage to teach their children how to read and how to perform even simple math problems plus basic grammar, as well as sentence, paragraph and essay writing in, at best, one or two hours a night.  If it’s hard for families with two parents present, you can imagine how hard it is for the single parent.  Plus this is assuming that all parents know how to teach even the earliest basic skills.  I spoke with many, many frustrated and desperate parents who had no idea how to teach and couldn’t understand how this could be expected of them.  Many of those who attended college protested that they didn’t study teaching.  (When I told them that a lot of us who got Education degrees didn’t study teaching either, they would give me funny looks.)  I also met many parents who were embarrassed to tell me that they themselves could not read.  They very much wanted their children to have a better chance.  I still meet illiterate adults – all the time – high school graduates plus - many of them are members of the middle class.

Interestingly, two-income families did not make it to Pasco County’s list of the family factors that would put children at risk of failure during the district’s latest paradigm shift.  See Below (pgs. 6-7):

I cannot stress this enough: The problem we have with our public school system is generational.  Because of especially harsh periods over the course of the last several decades, we’ve had large percentages of two or three generations deliberately dumbed down through the withholding of Phonics instruction, through the uselessness of New Math, through the total absence of grammar instruction, through the neglect of History and Science instruction - the list goes on and on.  These periods last around 10 – 15 years.  There are families who have older children able to read but younger children who can’t read, or vice versa, all because the schools chose to switch away from, or back to, effective reading instruction.  There are far too many families who haven’t had a well-educated generation in ages, simply because the timing of their children has coincided with their area schools’ dumbing down periods. 

In between these especially awful seizures which hit all children no matter what their family’s status, we’ve had outright discrimination against minorities, the recently immigrated and the poor of all colors.  All it takes is ineffective teachers using counterproductive teaching methods and weak materials.  I believe that the widening gap between the Haves and the Have-Not’s is caused essentially by the wide differences in educational quality available to America’s children in their public school system.  This inequality has been enabled by the lack of options given to the vast majority of parents.

The list above reflected the Educators’ confident expectation that it would be mostly poorly educated parents who would be providing the system with the subjects for their latest drop-out program research.  The uneducated are primarily clustered in poor, low-income families, many with a history of school drop-outs and dysfunction.   There is a great deal of stress in single parent and/or low-income households, and limited monitoring of student activities can occur when the adults are working two jobs or can’t afford daycare or any number of other circumstances. The poorly educated also will have low expectations for their children’s academic success because they never had any school success themselves and have no idea how to attain such a thing. We have to understand that most people who do poorly in school believe the fault lies within themselves, that there is something wrong with them, and that this wrong thing is genetic.  That’s what they’ve been told all their lives. “I’m dyslexic”, they’ll say, “And it runs in the family.” People who can’t read aren’t going to have books, magazines or newspapers in their houses, let alone “study aids”.  The lack of explicit instruction in the sound/spelling connections and the standard rules of grammar of the English language proves especially devastating to the progress of ESL children.  There was strong protest during the OBE days against fraudulent ESL classes that claimed to boost pride in the children’s diverse cultures, but proved much better at withholding the language skills that would help them succeed in their new American culture.

By improving no further than low-grade mediocrity, which looks so much better when compared to the sheer horror of what went before, the Educators continuously produce a steady supply of poorly educated children who will become the barely functional parents of tomorrow.  In fact, the E’s are just beginning to start the whole process all over again with new mandates and new goals and all kinds of promises – just as the victims of OBE have reached parenthood age.  This continuous loop of mediocrity - and worse - is not going to be corrected by shifting toward and mandating online instruction.  It wasn’t the lack of computers that led to our academic decline.  Nor is it going to improve the state of America’s public schools to have the E’s write yet another set of learning goals – we had goals galore during OBE/Blueprint 2000.  The only thing that is going to get Americans out of this cycle of educational abuse is universal parental choice.  The parents should choose whether or not their children take online courses at all, especially since reading text on a computer is already proving to be less effective than reading from print.  They also should be able to choose which online courses their children take since some of these courses are already getting iffy reviews.  I’ve heard of some students taking online gym classes – the fact that this would even be offered as a way for students to fulfill their online class mandate should disqualify educators from making these decisions.  Lots of decisions the schools have made over the course of the last 100 years or so should disqualify them from ever making choices for other people’s children ever again.  Universal parental choice – until we have that, we’ll continue to sink.

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.

Short History

Way back in the mid-1990’s, when my kids were in elementary school, the nation’s public schools began to change - again.  Around here, the first thing to go was a meaningful grading system, and by meaningful, I mean a report card that the parents could understand.  This made it nearly impossible for parents to realize how badly their children were starting to perform on tests, quizzes and other class work.  Homework was almost non-existent, so parents didn’t have that to go by either.  Along with this change was the switch to teaching methods that were known to fail horribly at producing student achievement.  Whole Language, which was blatantly anti-phonics, came to Florida after it was proven to fail to teach reading – California’s student reading scores had already begun plunging very shortly after its implementation.  The math curriculum, known variously as “Discovery Math” or “Fuzzy Math”, earned nation-wide scorn as did the federal-level folks who wrote the new math standards described as “a mile wide and an inch deep” by upset mathematicians.  Nothing was left untouched.  Grammar instruction had vanished long before.  History and Science teaching stopped; students instead were exhorted to learn to “explore” and “access information”.  Ever more ignorant students constantly had their self-esteem boosted by teachers gushing praise – for nothing.  Parents diving more deeply into what was going on were introduced to the concepts of Values Clarification, cognitive dissonance, change agents, and the Delphi Technique.  The Educators called this new paradigm “Outcome-Based Education”, Blueprint 2000” and “Holistic”, but I thought of it as “Spooky”. 

This was the worst spasm of dumbing down I’d ever seen or read about.  Naturally, children began to lose interest in their own education and to not care about the quality of their work.  I was complaining to my son about a terrible piece of work he showed me - a shoebox diorama book report with a short paragraph filled with misspellings and other errors sloppily pasted on the back that had received not one mark, correction or comment when he said to me, “But Mom, the teacher doesn’t care; why do you?”

 Pointing out that all these progressive methods had been tried before , and failed miserably, back in the 60’s-70”, had no effect on the E’s no matter how many people tried to tell them, how many expert articles were written (by fellow Educators!), how many pages of research were shown to them.  Nothing was going to change the course already set – by whom was a matter of great conjecture.  Meanwhile, my children were not receiving an education.  I had majored in English & Secondary Education – I hit the books.   And it turns out that dumbing down, both selectively and collectively, has a much longer and more sordid history than I ever dreamed.

For decades now, one of the more worrisome issues in the education world is the drop-out rate.  There are battles going on right now about how to define it and who to count.  The states give one percentage, and the feds give a different, less flattering percentage.  Everywhere, there is intense hand-wringing over what causes so many young people to lose interest in their futures to such an extent that they’d drop out of their schools. The Educators are willing to do just about anything to find out how to prevent it, so they say.

It is all a lie.

School personnel have known for several generations exactly how to produce drop-out behavior in children – in some cases, psychologically, as young as second grade.  It stands to reason that they have also known how to prevent it.

Parents whose kids were stuck in poor to mediocre schools were told in the 90’s that all the “improvements” the E’s were bringing about were “research-based”.  The parents understood this to mean that the new methods had been proven to be better at producing student achievement.  It turns out, however, that all the changes were an essential part of the actual research itself, but the curricular, grading and method changes were not experimental part. The research money that came pouring into the states was paying for all the various “Drop-out Prevention Programs” that would be tested on the students who fit the drop-out criteria.  The dumbing down of the 90’s, was simply the means of producing the criteria for the drop-out programs.   That’s right – the schools brought about drop-out behavior in order to study how to prevent drop-out behavior.

Education research money has been devastating the once vaunted United States public school system for generations.  Sometimes, primarily before anti-discrimination laws, the experiments have touched smaller, specific groups of students such as minorities or the poor. Other times, such as in the 1990’s – and the 60’s to70’s - the experiments will effect nearly everyone.  I believe this explains a great deal about the mess we find ourselves in today.  The extreme dumbing down that produced the criteria for filling various “Prevention” programs is what provided much of the impetus for the Charter School and Voucher movements as well as the further growth of the home school population. These are great movements, but they are way too limited to bring about the end of using the vast majority of trapped students as the Education Monopoly’s guinea pigs.  The voucher programs are primarily geared toward the very poor or the students who have already been labeled, often falsely. As it stands, there are next to no options for the mid to lower middle class and working class students, especially in these economic times.  We must have Universal Parental Choice so that everyone can have the same chance at providing their children with the education they deserve.  Our children shouldn’t have to be poor, or labeled, or win a lottery in order to Pursue the Happiness of thriving in a decent school.

This blog will cover many areas of the education issue, but I want to primarily focus on informing my readers about the extent, the depth, and the history of experiments performed on this country’s students without their parents’ knowledge, let alone permission.  The language quoting the results of school-based research can be pretty stilted.  I will usually give direct quotes and sources with my own commentary where I feel it necessary.  Here is one example of an experiment on reinforcement:

“In the first class of fifth-grader pupils the ‘extroverts’ were praised after each task, and the ‘introverts’ were blamed.  In the second class of pupils this procedure was reversed and the ‘extroverts’ were blamed while ‘introverts’ were praised.” (Kerlinger, Fred N. Foundations of Behavioral Research. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964.) (Citing: G. Thompson and C. Hunnicutt, “The Effects of Repeated Praise or Blame on the Work Achievement by ‘Introverts’ and ‘Extroverts,’” Journal of Educational Psychology, XXXV (1944), 257-266.)

Did the parents know, way back in the 1940’s that their children were being labeled as ‘introverts’ or ‘extroverts’ and that this was the basis of an experiment?  Were all the children in the class labeled one or the other?  Did the quality of the student’s task have no bearing on the teacher’s response – just the label?  Exactly how many billions of tax-payer money have been squandered on unnecessary experimentation under the mask of education?