The Real Reasons Students Dropout and the Failure of the Redesign Plan to Address Them
Every year Oregon Department of Education releases a dropout report. The reports are very detailed and include self-reported reasons that the students have dropped out. In Oregon, one of the possible reasons students have given for dropping out is lack of appropriate educational options.
The most recent report (2007/08) lists the number of PPS students identifying lack of appropriate educational options (even though there’s a category for it) as the reason for dropping out as ZERO. Maybe that’s because of the wide range of educational options that currently exist for PPS students.
Where’s the demand for a small focus school coming from? Carole with her limited alternative ed background?
The top reasons PPS students report dropping out include:
- Working more then 15 hours
- Pregnant or student parent
- Homeless
- Too far behind in credits to catch up
- Obligations to support family
How does the high school redesign plan address those issues?
The high school redesign plan will only perpetuate those problems. Time is important when students are working and going to school. The time spent traveling a longer distance to school increases the chances that students won’t go to school. Isn’t that part of the reason people want a neighborhood school? Why take your most at risk students as in Marshall’s case and create additional barriers?
The second highest reason students dropout is because they are pregnant or a student parent. Teen males and females drop out to parent their children. PPS has a Teen Parent program that has shown success.
Did you know that Marshall has a Teen Parent Early Head Start classroom? Yes, students parents and babies will be making longer commutes. Parents……you know what it was like to parent for the first time. Imagine being 16 years old and getting the baby and yourself ready to leave in the morning then taking several buses to get to class.
Remind me again. What’s the purpose of the high school redesign?
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The purpose of the high school redesign is to empty out buildings that have been earmarked for sale to generate “revenue” for the school district.
For “data-driven” people, PPS central office staff seem to be oblivious about a good chunk of data. They know test scores and all kinds of other statistics (the probability of a student dropping out based on factors like how many classes they fail as 8th or 9th graders), but they seem to not pay attention to the STUDENT VOICE when it comes to dropouts.
They should be looking at it from this perspective: what interventions or scaffolds have helped students that are working graduate from high school? What interventions and support structures/programs help teen parents? I don’t see any evidence – either in Carole’s report or anywhere else – that they’ve done any such analysis or evaluation.
Carole’s plan calls (on p. 54) for coming up with a plan at Marshall for teen parents, but there’s no mention of teen parents in the rest of the report. I guess we’ll only have teen parents at Marshall now?
There’s no mention of homeless students; students working after or before school; or genuine parent involvement. There’s a bit about credit recovery (p.15), but it’s not well articulated and is more of a goal statement than an actual, “Here’s how and why we’re going to actually do credit recovery.” It’s simply a “credit recovery lab” (p.24). No details.
The only parental involvement in the plan is a web-based system where parents can look up info about their student (grades, attendance, etc). Now, that’s not entirely useless, but it’s a far cry from actually involving parents in the schools (which is also notoriously tricky at the high school level for a variety of reasons).
PPS is a data-driven district – except they ignore important data. Brilliant!
Portland (through Multnomah County Health Department) offers some pretty amazing services to high school students through the school-based health care program. There is little doubt that without these services, the teen pregnancy rate would be much higher in our city. More can and should be done to curb the conditions that contribute to HS dropout. One thing policy makers and educators need to consider is that the dropout rate is a public health issue. Those who drop out have a greater chance of poor health in the future. As trite as it sounds, healthy kids learn better…Here is some evidence to support that:
Impact of School-Based Health Center Use on Academic Outcomes
A study published in the March 2010 Journal of Adolescent Health shows a significant increase in attendance for SBHC medical users compared to nonusers. In addition, SBHC mental health users had increased grade point average compared to nonusers.
Reframing High School Drop Out as a Public Health Issue
Preventing Chronic Disease has published this article connecting graduation from high school with better long term health. The article recommends that health professionals reframe the school dropout rate as a public health issue and offers steps that districts can take that will lead to improved school completion rates.
Healthier Students Are Better Learners: A Missing Link in School Reforms to Close the Achievement Gap
This article from Columbia University’s Campaign for Educational Equity builds the case for a focused national effort to reduce educationally relevant health disparities to close the achievement gap. National, state, and local strategies for helping schools implement high quality, strategically planned, and effectively coordinated school health programs are presented. These include policy development; guidance, technical assistance, and professional development; accountability supported by data and software systems; and priorities for a national research agenda.
Liz Smith Currie, thank you for an interesting point of view. No doubt it makes a good deal of sense. We can add this to a long list of negatives for our city concerning the high dropout rate including increased incarceration, poorer job opportunities, higher taxes, more crime, a less educated work force, a less educated community, and on and on. You would think the more affluent parts of the city would be genuinely concerned about this problem, but they merely espouse concern without really doing anything substantial about it, posturing only. So we get the mayor’s committee, high school redesign, and rediculous school reform and over stressed testing. Not serious improvements in the middle grades which are the breeding grounds setting the stage for future drop outs. You would think they would know better and care more, but it usuallyisn’t their children so too bad.
Liz Smith Currie, thank you for an interesting point of view. No doubt it makes a good deal of sense. We can add this to a long list of negatives for our city concerning the high dropout rate including increased incarceration, poorer job opportunities, higher taxes, more crime, a less educated work force, a less educated community, and on and on. You would think the more affluent parts of the city would be genuinely concerned about this problem, but they merely espouse concern without really doing anything substantial about it, posturing only. So we get the mayor’s committee, high school redesign, and rediculous school reform and over stressed testing. Not serious improvements in the middle grades which are the breeding grounds setting the stage for future drop outs. You would think they would know better and care more, but it usuallyisn’t their children so too bad.
Would you please post a link to the report you cited listing the reason students drop out?
Chris – The data was from the 2007/08 Details (A1 to A9) report released on 5/8/09. A new report was released on 5/25/09.
Both dropout reports can be found at:
http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?=1
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