education reform

Washington County Public Schools presented some dismaying news last week.

The Hagerstown, Md., school district’s dropout rate has increased for the past two years. In the 2009-10 year, the rate was 1.56 percent. That inched up to 1.80 in 2010-11 and then hitting 1.93 percent last school year, according to The Herald Mail.

It should be noted these numbers are down from the 5.5 percent rate in 2000, but seeing an increase in the dropout rate — even a small one — can be discouraging.

Donna Hanlin, assistant superintendent for curriculum, school administration and improvement, said part of the reason for the increase in dropouts was because of a more transient school population.

Research has shown that a transient student population does have negative impacts on student achievement  and the classroom environment.

District officials said they are considering an alternate high school to help these students earn their diplomas.

In this post, our first installment of a weekly feature called Research Wednesday, we’d like to share with you a study that shows that programs intended to help transient students only succeed when they address the underlying issues students are facing.

Though periodically interrupted by protestors dressed as Sesame Street characters, Rupert Murdoch told an otherwise supportive audience that “we need to tear down an education system designed for the 19th Century” and said Americans must approach education “the way my friend, Steve Jobs, approached every industry.”

The founder and chairman or News Corporation said the status quo is “unjust, unsustainable and un-American.”

Kill tenure. End due process. Fight the unions.

A panel of legislators and education leaders at the 2011 National Summit on Education Reform advised tough love for making school change.

But education policy analyst Bryan Hassell said that it’s not enough to just make it harder for bad teachers to continue in the profession.

“There are 3.2 million teachers in the country,” Hassell said. “There is no profession where we fill up the entire profession with excellent employees.”

Clearly suffering withdrawals from his suddenly silent Blackberry smart phone, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told an audience of hundreds of educators, education service providers and policy makers that he was considering a change.

  If Blackberry doesn’t get his act together soon, Bush lamented, “I’m going to the iPhone, I guess… join all those folks who have learned how to do this in a much harder format.”

 The line drew a hearty laugh from the crowd at the 2011 National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco, but it exemplified the Foundation for Excellence in Education chairman’s stone-serious message: If something isn’t working, changes must be made — and quickly.

  In his address, Bush called for more rigorous academic standards, guided by a common core set of standards focused on the most important academic competencies.

They're going to be just fine.

That's the news out of Michigan, where the Class of 2011 — the first to face a series of tougher graduation requirements — appears to have dodged the dropout avalanche predicted by some critics. 

Failing school districts often know what's wrong with their schools — from weak leadership to inadequate skill levels among teachers to insufficient teaching materials and training — but these districts rarely have a comprehensive strategy for how to implement reforms, according to a recent report from the National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices.

Vice President Joe Biden today issued a call to action to boost college graduation rates across the country and help the nation meet President Obama’s goal for the United States to have the best-educated workforce and the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. Speaking at the first-annual Building a Grad Nation Summit, Biden called on governors of every state in the nation to host a state college completion summit and announced a new grant competition focused on helping institutions of higher education boost completion rates.
 
“Right now we’ve got an education system that works like a funnel when we need it to work like a pipeline,” Biden said. “We have to make the same commitment to getting folks across the graduation stage that we did to getting them into the registrar’s office. The dreams and skills of our college graduates will pave the way to a bright economic future for our nation.”

President Barack Obama on Monday cited the remarkable turnarounds of two schools — each of which went from graduating a minority of students to graduating nearly all of them — as he pushed for changes in the nation's 10-year-old No Child Left Behind law.
Speaking at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Va., Obama applauded the efforts of students, parents, teachers, administrators and community members who helped reverse a pattern of failure at Bruce Randolph School in Denver and Taft High School in Cincinnati.

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.