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Recent Posts for Gregg Rosann
Online learning isn't failing — online programs are. And it's time for a change.
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.
Legislators: Don’t take the keys away just yet
Drive cautiously.
That’s our advice to South Carolina and Minnesota legislators, who are considering bills that would suspend the driver's licenses of teens who drop out of school.
At first blush, these bills seem to make a lot of sense: Students might think twice about leaving school if they’re worried that they won’t be able to drive. And with an on-time graduation rate of 72 percent in South Carolina, state leaders should use whatever tools they can to encourage students to make better choices.
Legislators who want to take drivers licenses from dropouts might be on the wrong road
Drive cautiously.
That’s our advice to South Carolina legislators, who are considering a bill that would suspend the driver's licenses of teens who drop out of school.
At first blush, the bill seems to make a lot of sense: Students might think twice about leaving school if they’re worried that they won’t be able to drive. And with an on-time graduation rate of 72 percent, state leaders should use whatever tools they can to encourage students to make better choices.
Problem is, most students don’t really choose to drop out of school — not in the way that one might assume.
Dropout recovery: We've got the beat — and we want to share it with you
We’ve been beating this drum for so long that our hands are raw and our ears are ringing.
But darn it, it seems like all that pounding just might be working. All of the sudden a lot of people are dancing to our beat. And we couldn’t be more excited.
A matter of life and death
Day after day, he bravely walked the gauntlet of taunts, threats and physical attacks. And day after day, things got worse. In a science classroom, one day, two students held Jamie Nabozny on the ground and pretended to rape him. As other students looked on, the assailants told their victim that he should enjoy what they were doing to him.
Is the Count Day carnival suffocating dropout recovery efforts?
If the past is prelude, things are about to get a bit surreal in the Wolverine State.
Wednesday, Sept. 29 is “Count Day” in Michigan’s public schools — the day in which education officials take a census of students for the purpose of divvying up state education funding.
Detroit Public School students who attended class during last year’s Count Day were entered into drawings for a 42-inch plasma flat screen TV, laptop computers, iPods and gift cards.
13 things we’d like to hear President Obama say about the dropout epidemic
President Obama told the nation’s students to work hard and dream big in his annual back-to-school address, delivered Tuesday afternoon from Philadelphia's Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School.
An oil-slicked slope: Why government programs that herd dropouts toward a GED are cutting students short
It would be easy to forget that anything else has happened in Louisiana over the past few months. But even as the nation’s attention has been transfixed by the enormous environmental and economic disaster caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, life has gone on in the Pelican State.
"It's the economy, stupid"
Students of color made up a sizable portion of the estimated 600,000 students who dropped out from the Class of 2008 in the nation's forty-five largest metropolitan areas, according to a new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education.
The discouraging totals: 113,600 African American, 200,000 Latino, 3,750 American Indian, and 30,800 Asian American students are estimated to have dropped out from the class.
Of whiz-kids and wizards: Why it’s time to change the way we think about who can go to high school
The University of Rhode Island was looking for a few good students. And Teresa Mahony figured she fit the bill.
At nearly 70 years old, Mahony enrolled in college, setting for herself a goal of completing one class each semester. Ten years later — just weeks before her 80th birthday — Mahony graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history.