The Dropout Problem | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Roughly, one out of three Beaufort County youth who enter the ninth grade fail to graduate within five years. Even more fail to graduate on time (in four years) and if you factor in those who enter the community college system, or some other "alternative program" without a high school diploma, the numbers are much worse.

    And everyone "knows" that the chances for success for young people without a high school diploma are dismal.

    Nearly every school board member and every politician we have ever known expresses concern about this issue. So what are we doing about the problem?

    A recent John Locke Foundation study provides a primer on the State's efforts to reduce the dropout rate. What it shows is that the State's approach is to spread a little money around to many sites (which makes it amount to a lot of money) to programs that "sound" good and like Little Jack Horner, say "what a good leader am I." It is the classic liberal approach to a social problem...throw some money at it, feel good that we're "doing something" and never mind whether it really fixes the problem or not. We feel better.

    Before I offer my prescription for the problem allow a bit of personal experience. When I first became a high school principal our school had the highest dropout rate among nine high schools in Wake County. Within three years we had the lowest dropout rate. We had 1800 students on average at that time and I, as the principal, could recite the names of every dropout we had thus far each year. The point of that is I knew what the problems were that were causing these kids to leave school. They were not statistics. But it helped because there were so few. Here are some things I learned from that experience.

    First, not all kids are going to graduate either on time or within five years. We typically had a half dozen or so who dropped out because of medical conditions. Some went to jail. And a few were simply incapable of meeting the minimum standards.

    But most of the dropouts initially left school because they were behind and it was hopeless that they could pass. We did our homework with the "research" extant at the time. Most of the "models" used a basic approach to this problem of lowering the standards for passing. (And that is exactly what Beaufort County is now doing). We had an alternative school that was doing that and while more got a diploma, I knew few of them were really being prepared to go to work or go on to post secondary training. We were delaying failure.

    So rather than lower the standards, or expectations, we did the opposite. We raised them. We selected the four best teachers, two English and two math, we had in our school and assigned them to the task. When two of them eventually moved away we hired two more...elementary certified teachers. We identified "at risk" students at the beginning of the ninth grade and put them in classes that did little but teach them reading, writing and basic math skills. We used what educators now call a "diagnostic-prescriptive" approach. That's a fancy way of saying that we made a list of skills or knowledge every student needs to know or be able to do and we assessed each student on their competency skill by skill and we taught it until they mastered each skill. And one of the things we learned early on was that "mastery" needed to be set very high. We learned as we "raised" the mastery level that the higher we raised it the more students met the higher standards. We did some other things but they were "icing on the cake" and not what really caused the success. What "worked" was to teach these students basic skills so they could be successful at the next level. It worked. Not for every student, but for most of them.

    A few years later, for reasons we'll forego explaining here, the program was scrapped. The dropout rate for that school, within three years was the second highest in the system.

    The moral of that story is that if you want to do something effective to keep students from dropping out you need to focus on being sure they can read, write and compute at a high level, and you need to be sure they understand what is expected of them. The reward system was simple: Success produces pride in self-accomplishment.

    It is not rocket science.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.