With education reform on the table, Secretary Duncan notes importance of dropout fight

Want to keep students in school? It's time to raise expectations.

That's the message Education Secretary Arne Duncan shared Sunday afternoon in a discussion preceding President Barack Obama's anticipated call for an overhaul of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
"Many students drop out because they are not being challenged," he said.

He acknowledged the counter-intuitive nature of the proposition that struggling students would be helped if more was asked of them. "Some folk thinks that would increase the dropout rate — I couldn't disagree more," he said.
Indeed, a report released in November by the America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center found that schools, district and states that raise standards see an associated decrease in dropouts.
But that, Duncan said, it not enough.
"It's very important that you have real relationships with students," he said, adding that the increased focus in data-driven decision making has given educators the tools they need to identify and focus on at-risk students. "As early as middle school we know who these students are," he said.
And echoing a theme of the 2010 National Dropout Prevention Conference in Philadelphia, Duncan said that if the nation wants to get a handle on the dropout epidemic, it's time that educators, bureaucrats and politicians start listening to the ideas of those who have the biggest stake in the state of the nation's education system.
"We haven't asked students themselves how they feel," he lamented.
No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001 with bipartisan Congressional support, requires schools to bring 100 percent of students to proficiency in math and reading — by 2014. Few hold out hope, however, that goal will be reached and Duncan said earlier this week that as many as 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools are currently failing the federal mandate.
But in the Sunday interview, Duncan said one of the successes of the law was that it brought greater attention to schools with poor test scores, noting that "as a country we used to like to sweep challenges like that under the rug, and that will never happen again."  
In many other respects he was far more critical. "The law is far too punitive," he said. "There are dozens of ways to fail and the only reward for success is you're not labeled a failure."
One area where the law itself fails: While mandating school improve test scores, it says little about graduation rates. And researchers from Rice University in Houston and the University of Texas-Austin have found that the sort of high-stakes, test-based accountability promoted under the law has a negative impact on graduation rates.
"What we found is, the higher the stakes — whether principals get a bonus or lose their jobs, or whether your school could lose funding or even be closed if the scores don't go up — then the greater the likelihood that the adults in the system start to look at the kids according to whether they are assets to the schools' rankings or whether they are liabilities," lead author Linda McSpadden McNeil told School Library Journal in 2008.
Duncan said it's time for "a new law that is fair, flexibility and focused on the students."