Franklin Schargel’s Blog

I have just taped “Eye on New Mexico” for KOB for broadcast on Sunday morning at 10AM. On the show I have said that Dr. Veronica Garcia- State Superintendent, Governor Richardson and Winston Brooks, APS Superintendent are attacking the dropout problem all wrong. The following Sunday, August 16th, Dr. Garcia and Winston Brooks will be offering a counter argument. We need to have a dialogue because we are losing too many kids in this state. If you miss the show, you can see it on line at KOB.com starting on Sunday Afternoon.

The Schott Foundation for Public Education found that only eight of 50 states provided disadvantaged students equitable access to moderately proficient public education systems.

The study shows minority and low-income students have only half the opportunity to learn in our public schools as their White non-Latino peers.

The data was summarized in Lost Opportunity: A 50-State Report on the Opportunity to Learn in America, a state-by-state study released by the Schott Foundation for Public Education. The study analyzed student performance data reported by state departments of education to determine both the quality of and access to instruction provided in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

“This serves as a wake-up call to every governor, legislature, state education commissioner, and schools superintendent that falsely believes we are getting the job done in our classrooms,” said Dr. John Jackson, President and CEO of the Schott Foundation. “According to their own data, only eight states are providing a moderately proficient, high-access public education to all. After a decade of leaving no child behind, we are finding an entire generation of students is again all but forgotten.”

Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and Virginia were the only states identified as providing both a moderate-proficiency and high-access education for all students.

Rounding out the bottom, eight states – Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Rhode Island, Texas, and West Virginia, along with the District of Columbia – appear to provide low-proficiency and low-access education, according to their own data.

Some states provided moderately proficient education for most students but demonstrated low access when providing that education to historically disadvantaged students. These states included: Connecticut, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Seventeen states were found to provide high-access, but low-proficiency education to their students. These states included: Alabama, Alaska, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and Utah.

The state-by-state data, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and income, can be found at www.otlstatereport.org.

“Over the past decade, we have declared that data is king in education improvement,” Jackson said. “The state data is clear. If you are a Black, Latino, Native American, or low-income student in this country, odds are you are not receiving high-quality learning opportunities. After more than a half century, we are still not providing truly equal educational opportunities to all students. After more than a quarter century, our nation is still very much at risk. Quality for a few and access for some is hardly the standard to which we should hold our states and school districts.”

Delving deeper into the state-provided data, only six states offer Black students a relatively equal opportunity to learn, compared to their White, non-Latino peers. Eighty percent of states fail to offer Latino students a fairly good opportunity to learn, while nearly 80 percent of states fail to offer low-income students a strong opportunity to learn. Low-income students have the highest opportunity learn in those states with low minority populations.

The report highlights the educational and economic effects of that gap. California and New York each account for 15 percent of the nation’s nearly $60 billion annual economic burden attributable to opportunity to learn inequities. Texas accounts for an additional 12 percent. The next three states — Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania — account for 5 percent each. New York’s share of the economic effect of inequity is nearly three times its percentage of the national population.

There are four major causes of students dropping out of school:
a. The child him/herself
b. The family situation
c. The community they live in
d. The school environment

In order to prevent students from dropping out of school, we must attack the causes listed above. Some of them are out of our control. For example, we cannot address the community they live in or in most cases, their family situation. But we can address the choices they make and the school environment. One of the ways of doing so is for educators to ask a serious of tough questions.

How inviting a classroom environment is there for the student? Are the walls painted in “happy colors” or are they drab institutional gray or green? Are your bulletin boards filled with student work, left blank or with commercial advertisements?

Are all students encouraged to learn? Has the school created different classes for students ““ those designed to pass and those designed to fail? Those who will go on to college and those who will drop out. What role can you, as a classroom instructor, play in overcoming this paradigm?

How many students start in your school or system, graduate? Does the school track their progress through the system? Are “safety nets” built in for those who are identified as at-risk? What “pillars” support these safety nets? Are you one of these safety nets? Do you know how to get additional assistance in helping students graduate? (Is there additional counseling, mentoring, after school learning activities, service-learning projects designed to connect school to the world of work? As you track, is the largest reason for kids leaving school, “miscellaneous”?

How many students who dropouts are actually pushed out? (Students who are told, by word or action, “I do not want you in my class” or “I don’t need you in my school.”) How close to graduation are students who dropout? Do they need one credit or ten? What has the school done to help them make up the credit? What role can you, as a classroom instructor, play in overcoming this paradigm? What is done to support the “psychological” dropout ““ the child who is physically in the school but mentally is miles away. What role can you, as a classroom instructor, play in overcoming this paradigm?

Are we preparing our students with the skills they will need in the 21st century?

Before the economy began to disintegrate, industry people were looking for people who were analytical and were data-crushers. Now they are looking for people who can use analytics as well as “out-of the box” thinkers.

Number crunching jobs are more easily and cheaply done by outsourcing and by computer software. Where America has long prospered has been in its ability to create and innovate.

“Today computers are turning traditional left-brain work, jobs where a series of steps leads to one answer, into a commodity that can be outsourced,” says Daniel Pink, who has written a book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Pink says the shift to right-brain thinking already can be found in companies that welcome well-rounded employees, medical schools that push art studies and classrooms that encourage collaborative problem-solving.

“We’re realizing that our economy is not about standardization,” Daniel Pink says. An impediment has been a No Child Left Behind educational system that is too geared to test-taking. “What’s troubling is that our system is obsessed with standardization at the very time when the future of our economy depends on the opposite.”

HR people are looking for people who have the ability to solve problems in unique ways, lead co-workers and thrive in a loose organizational structure.
In Cambridge, Mass.,

Three Questions we need to ask ourselves:
1. Do you consider yourself more “right brain” or “left brain”?
2. What about your own children?
3. Do you think the education system cultivates both or should it change?

Source: USA Today, July 14, 2009

Traditional societal problems used to be addressed by the community, churches and families. Today’s challenges are being placed in schools. Problems such as teaching young people to say “no” to sex and drugs, teaching driver’s education and swimming, teaching students to prevent suicide, etc. are being placed in school curricula where schools are already being overburdened by the demands of high stakes testing and No Child Left Behind.

First, schools do not have the time to include these subjects. Nor in the case of drug, alcohol, suicide prevention, have most of us had the training to deal with these societal problems.

In a report from the Partnership/MetLife Foundation, 34% of fathers and 22% of mothers agree that it is the parents’ main responsibility to teach teenagers about drug use.

Whose responsibility do you think these problems are?

If we look at the high performing countries as defined by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we see that they have NATIONAL STANDARDS. America has state, regional and local standards. That may be changing.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is offering federal cash incentives to achieve one of his priorities: developing national standards for reading and math to replace a current hodgepodge of benchmarks in the states.

Duncan has stated that the efforts of 46 states to develop common, internationally measured standards for student achievement would be bolstered by up to $350 million in federal funds to help them develop tests to assess those standards.

Education decisions generally are controlled by the states, and the federal government cannot mandate national standards. That makes for wide variation from state to state. Students and schools deemed failing in one state might get passing grades in another.

It will be up to states to adopt the new standards. But Duncan has been using his bully pulpit to push the effort “” and now he’s using Washington’s checkbook, too. He said spending up to $350 million to support state efforts to craft assessments would be Washington’s largest-ever investment in encouraging a set of common standards.

The money will come from the federal Education Department’s $5 billion fund to reward states that adopt innovations the Obama administration supports.

Duncan said that people are “coming to realize that 50 states doing their own thing doesn’t make sense.”

Every state except Alaska, South Carolina, Missouri and Texas has signed on to an effort to develop standards by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. But getting the states to adopt whatever emerges will be politically difficult.

Education Week has supplied a way to see how your state is applying the Federal Stimulus monies it receives. It appears that many states have not applied for it and that fewer have developed plans for disbursement.

The following provides national and state-by-state breakdowns of funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that has been budgeted for distribution by the U.S. Department of Education, based on estimates by the department. These amounts, which are rounded to the nearest whole number, do not include funds that are to be awarded through competitive grants, such as the Race to the Top fund and the Investing in What Works and Innovation grants. | LAST UPDATED: 7/13/2009

https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/infographics/follow_stimulus.html
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