Franklin Schargel’s Blog

According to the most recent data released from the United States Department of Education the on-time graduation rate for the nation’s public high schools has reached another all-time high. Eighty-two percent of the class of 2014 graduated with a regular high school diploma within four years, as measured by the Education Department’s Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate, or ACGR. The graduation rate rose by a full percentage point from the prior year and by 3 percentage points since 2011, when the department first started requiring states to calculate and report graduation rates using this method. Graduation rates in roughly half the states reached or exceeded the 85 percent mark for the class of 2014.

Although the graduation rate for the nation as a whole has improved over the years, progress has been far from uniform, and critical gaps remain. Where students live still very much matters when it comes to their chances of graduating with a diploma in four years. Thirty percentage points separate the states with the highest and lowest on-time graduation rates for the class of 2014. Iowa leads the nation, with 91 percent of its students graduating on time. At the other extreme, only 61 percent graduated on time in the District of Columbia, which is considered a state for the purposes of this analysis.

Graduation rates are on the rise in most states. From 2013 to 2014, rates increased in 35 states, while holding steady in nine states and decreasing in six. Delaware and Alabama made the biggest strides, increasing on-time graduation rates by 7 percentage points and 6 percentage points, respectively.

Consistent with long-term trends, members of the class of 2014 from historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups are much less likely to finish high school. On-time graduation rates for white students, at 87 percent, outpace those for their American Indian, 70 percent; black, 73 percent; and Latino, 76 percent, peers by considerable margins. With an 89 percent graduation rate, Asian students graduate at the highest rates.

Gains among lower-performing groups have been particularly strong in recent years, helping to narrow racial and ethnic achievement gaps.

The federal agency also releases results for students based on their English-proficiency and disability status. The on-time graduation rate for both English-language learners and students with disabilities is 63 percent for the class of 2014, a level 19 percentage points lower than the average for the nation as a whole. Improvements for those groups have also outpaced the U.S. average, with gains of 6 percentage points since 2011 for English-learners and 4 points for students with disabilities.

Gov. Sam Brownback said that he would call the Legislature into special session to tackle education funding and respond to a state Supreme Court order declaring that public schools might not be able to open after June. Mr. Brownback, a Republican, did not set a date for the Republican-dominated Legislature to reconvene to beat a June 30 deadline set by the court for lawmakers to fix school finances. The court last month rejected some changes in school finance laws that lawmakers had made to comply with an earlier order from the justices to improve funding for poor schools. Public schools are out for the summer, but they provide services year-round to special education students and serve meals to poor children. (AP)

After cutting school budgets, the governor and the state legislature need to beat a June 30th deadline.  The legislature is on a break (for the summer). Hopefully the legislatures and the governor can meet the deadline and do what is right.

I was recently interviewed by the Smallbiz America for a National Radio Podcast. The theme of the presentation is that the best graduates in Albuquerque are not competing for jobs with the best graduates from New York City but they are competing with the best graduates in the world. It can be accessed here: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/smallbizamerica/2016/05/18/smallbiz-america-radio

I will be speaking at the Girl Bulling Conference being held @ Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV on June 29 from 2;45PM -3;45PM.  The topic of my workshop is “Strategies to End Bullying in Your School”.

 

Testing is part of life. Doctors give tests in order to get relevant information about a patient. You need to take a driver’s test in order to get a license. And teachers give tests. So I am not opposed to testing. I am opposed to how “educational reformers” are using the results of high stakes tests. There are too many variables to measure teacher, or students’ or school performance.

The purpose of a test is to determine what to do next. If you take a medical examination and do not do well, the doctor will recommend a second evaluation to see if the second test validates the first. If you fail the first driving test, you will get a second chance or a third chance to pass.

But high stakes tests only results in things that we already know ““ that students from low-income, minority-families will, on average, perform less well than students from higher-income families who are educated in better-equipped schools with more experienced staff.

But educational reformers want to hold teachers in low performing schools solely responsible for poor test results. In New Mexico, where I live, our Secretary of Education wants to link teacher salaries to low performance rather than improving the schools by supplying them with additional more experienced teachers, more services like social workers, more recently published and sufficient number of text books, and more technology.

Blaming teachers for poor results is like blaming a fireman for being at the scene of a fire ““ holding those responsible for something they did not cause.

It is time to stop fixing the blame and to start fixing the problem.

 

 

 

 

The New York Times reported, (5/10/2016) on a report from Education Reform Now, a nonprofit think tank, which analyzed cost and course data collected by the Education Department for students who entered college in 2011. More than a half-million poorly prepared students “” or about one in four “” were required to take remedial courses in math, English or writing. Forty-five percent of them came from middle-, upper-middle- and high-income families. Fifty-seven percent of the students needing remedial classes attended public community colleges. The rest went to other schools, including private four-year nonprofit colleges and universities.

The costs to families are considerable. For example, remedial students at private, nonprofit four-year schools spent an average of $12,000 extra to study content that should have been learned in high school. The total cost for all students and their families for remediation was nearly $1.5 billion for the 2011-12 school year.

The cost should be measured not just in dollars, but also in unmet goals. Among full-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree, those who take remedial courses are 74 percent more likely to drop out of college than non-remedial students.

The results are surprising in that schools in privileged communities are failing to prepare significant numbers of students and that nearly half of the students who begin their college careers taking remedial courses come from middle- and upper-income families. Not only do remedial courses add more than $1 billion each year to students’ bills for tuition, but also students who start out in these classes take longer to graduate and are far more likely to drop out.

The study challenges commonly held preconceptions about who needs extra help in college. At private, nonprofit four-year schools, for example, students whose families were in the top 20 percent of income nationally actually took more remedial courses than students in the bottom 20 percent at the same colleges. Part of the problem is that high schools offer a rigorous curriculum for relatively few students and often use a grading system that masks underperformance.

The problem can also be that colleges shouldn’t be accepting students who aren’t capable of doing college-level work. What better way of gauging the importance of high school than validating a high school diploma? Maybe the standards of colleges and high schools should be changed?

For the second year in a row, I have been honored to have been as an Education Global Gurus in the 2016 ranking. Only 30 individuals are selected every year by Global Gurus International.

 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

• Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years
• The percentage of children aged 6″“11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2012. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12″“19 years who were obese increased from 5% to nearly 21% over the same period.
• In 2012, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese.

Obese youth are more likely to have increased risk for cardiovascular disease and heart attacks. In a population-based sample of 5- to 17-year-olds, 70% of obese youth had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease is the largest cause of death in the United States and each day more than 1000 people experience a sudden out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. According to a Mayo Clinic Commentary (June 2015) (https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196%2815%2900305-5/abstract) 21 states now mandate that a child have Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) training in school. (Some reports state that as many as 33 states mandate training.) Students are more likely to encounter cardiac arrest victims in shopping malls, movie theatres or among family members. No child should be allowed to graduate high school without CPR training.

All educators, as well, need to be trained in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR).