Education is cumulative — and brick walls are bad

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared, as one of his top priorities, the turning around of our nation’s 5,000 worst high schools in America, he seems to have missed an obvious point, argues Steve Peha of Teaching That Makes Sense.    

"Education is cumulative," Peha wrote at the Dropout Nation blog. "Our nation’s dropout crisis is a K-12 crisis... We can’t solve the high school dropout problem by focusing solely on high schools; we have to work on it all along the way."

We love Peha's passion and are excited to share his ideas. We also noted with interest the comments of David Britten, who took the idea of educational continuity one step further, noting that focus needs to be on "the 0-3 ages where literacy foundations are established." Britten argued that it's unfair to expect young students who don't have a foundation in literacy to be able to catch up with their peers in elementary school (or at all.)

Britten's correct: If we want to seriously tackle the dropout epidemic, we can't just look at education as something that begins at the age of five. And taking the argument one step further: perhaps we shouldn't look at education as something that ends at 18, either.

Every year, tens of thousands of students who might otherwise be interested in continuing to pursue their high school diplomas lose the option to do so because they age out of their state's public education system. (Most states only fund public education for students under a certain age, usually before the age of 21.) While it's important to reform failing schools in a way that helps these students to have earlier academic success, it's unlikely that alone will help this nation reach anything close to Duncan's lofty goals — not so long as students who fall behind in their studies are facing a situation in which it is impossible to finish their studies before they're pushed out of the system. This situation has the double-whammy effect of creating dropouts and discouraging (or outright barring) dropouts from re-entering school. For more on this, read Gregg Rosann's piece "Of whiz-kids and wizards" at NoDropouts.org