dropout recovery

Those involved in the fight to raise the nation’s woeful dropout rate have been waiting a long time for a president to elevate the issue to a level commensurate with the threat this epidemic poses to our nation’s future.

So it was pleasing to hear President Barack Obama say in his third State of the Union address that our nation must commit to ensuring that more students “walk the stage to get their diploma.”

But the president's prescriptive advice — not allowing students to “walk away from their education” by having every state require all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18 — demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem at hand.

Put simply: The act of dropping out isn’t about age – it’s about options.

In our work serving dropouts in partnership with more than 50 school districts across the United States, the teachers, mentors and advocates of The American Academy’s NoDropouts program see young men and women who left school because they become parents, become sick, need to earn full-time wages or are scared of bullies and gangs.

These problems have nothing to do with how old they are.

  Half of online students wind up leaving their virtual schools within a year of enrolling. Online schools produce three times as many dropouts as they do graduates. Millions of dollars are going to virtual schools for students who are no longer attending classes.

  Those are the hard facts in a scathing account of the state of Colorado’s virtual school industry from the I-News Network investigative journalism consortium and the nonprofit Education News Colorado. The report concluded that the “churn” of students in and out of online schools is drawing tremendous resources away from public schools, which are often left holding the bag when virtual schools fail to meet students’ needs and expectations. 

  Let’s be honest and let’s be clear: These problems are not confined to the Centennial State. It’s reasonable to expect that similar investigative efforts in other states will produce similarly blistering results. 

From teachers to technical support, American Academy students gave their online program high marks when surveyed by Washington State’s Digital Learning Department.

The recently released survey results show that nearly nine out of every 10 members of The American Academy’s student body — mostly dropouts and other studentsat risk of dropping out — report being satisfied with the program.