Franklin Schargel’s Blog

The  American Society of Civil Engineers’  released a report “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” analyzing the condition of schools.  The 2013 report gave the schools a “poor grade” a D-.  While the energy systems, bridges and dams in the country received a D+.  The report estimated that to bring the schools up to standard would cost roughly $270 billion.

America is a reactive society.  It doesn’t do things until something happens which demands action.  So as Congress and states cut spending in education, the condition of our schools grows worse.  It is still hard for me to believe that most schools in the country do not have air conditioning.  I know of schools where the building is still heated using coal.  I do not know of businesspeople or politicians who would be willing to work in these conditions.  Why should educators and children have to work in them?

A new report out from ACT Inc. finds that at-risk students who start out “far off track” academically are unable to recover within four years.The Iowa City, Iowa-based testing organization examined the progress of students from certain demographic groups, including students from low-income families, those with disabilities, African-American and Hispanic students, and English-language learners. Testing students from these backgrounds who were identified as below grade level in 4th and 8th grades, and again in 8th and12th grades, researchers found they were generally not able to get back on track, as measured by ACT’s college-readiness benchmarks.

The report, “Catching Up to College and Career Readiness: The Challenge is Greater for At-Risk Students,” showed that despite early detection of academic struggles, students seldom were able to close the gap as they progressed through school. Two previous reports by ACT in this series found that strong preschool and elementary programs contribute to student success in later years, yet students in the general population who were behind in 4^th and 8^th struggled to improve much by middle and high school.

In this analysis, ACT reviewed student scores from 245,000 students in Arkansas and Kentucky.

The analysis concludes, for instance, that among students who were considered “far off-track” in science as 8th graders, just 2 percent of those who were low-income were able to meet the ACT science benchmarks by 12th grade, while 6 percent of those who were not low-income achieved the standard. For low-income, far-off-track students in 4th grade science, about 9 percent were able to catch up by 8th grade, according to ACT.  For those who struggled in math in 8th grade, just 1 percent met the benchmarks by high school graduation and 5 percent in that same demographic group who were behind in 4th grade improved significantly by 8th grade.

To address these gaps, the report recommends local schools teach a content-rich curriculum in the early grades, conduct a gap analysis of the district’s current practices, monitor and intervene early, use data on students’ prior performance in planning secondary school programs and setting goals. Federal policymakers should fund evaluation research on teaching content-rich curriculum in elementary school and encourage the use of statewide longitudinal data systems for research studies, ACT suggests.

There is no such thing as a high school dropout.  It is not an event, it is a process and the research indicates that the process must begin early, in elementary school, not middle or high school.

 

This information was supplied by Tony Watkins, M.A.A., Student, Family, and Community Supports, Albuquerque Public Schools.  I am indebted for his service.

The importance of  using and promoting research-based approaches is essential for increasing graduation rates .  It came up recently in the context of ethnic studies programs, specifically the Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson.  The program has been audited three times, and each time it has proven to be a success. Here is one study that shows its impact on graduation rates:

https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Mexican-American-Studies_11.14.12.pdf

When curriculum and instruction resonated with the histories and identities of students and families, when students were equipped with a  critical analysis of the root causes of inequities, and when students became advocates for themselves and their communities, graduation rates increased.   The program, as many of you know, was outlawed by the State of Arizona, but is now in the process of being reinstated after advocates challenged the decision in court.

The APS family engagement policy developed by Families United for Education (attached) calls for “”¦utilizing the histories and cultures of our families as a foundation (for education)” and it calls for “equitable and effective systems”.  It is my hope that Mission Graduate can help ensure its execution in our schools.

October is Bullying Prevention Month. My interview on this subject was telecast on Sunday October 19th on Eye on New Mexico. Here’s the video:

I will be appearing on Eye on New Mexico, KOB on Sunday, October 19, 2014.  I will be discussing bullying prevention with Nicole Brady. If you are unable to watch or record the show, it will be archived on KOB for a week.

President Barack Obama unveiled the administration’s vision for a new and improved Bureau of Indian Education to dramatically improve the federally funded schools that serve nearly 50,000 American Indian children. The long-troubled agency directly operates 57 schools for Native American students and oversees 126 others run under contract by tribes””a small slice of the wide range of publicly funded schools serving that student population. On most measures of educational success, American Indian and Alaska Native children lag behind their peers. According to federal data, the four-year graduation rate for American Indian and Alaska Native students in 2011-12 was 67 percent, trailing all other major student groups except for English-language learners.

BIE students, compared with their Native American peers in regular public schools, also scored lower on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and math tests in 4th grade. Poverty rates in tribal communities are among the most severe in the nation. Pine Ridge, S.D., which is home to the 40,000-member Oglala Lakota Nation, has a per-capita income of less than $8,000 a year, for example

The plan calls for a reorientation of the BIE from an agency that operates schools from Washington to a “school improvement organization” that delivers resources and support services to schools that are locally controlled by tribes.

The reorganization of the BIE comes after years of scathing reports from watchdog groups, including the U.S Governments Accountability Office and chronic complaints from tribal educators about the agency’s financial and academic mismanagement and failure to advocate more effectively for the needs of schools that serve Native American students. The reorganization process will unfold during the next two years. It also comes a year after Secretary of the Interior Jewell, whose department includes the BIE, called the federally funded Indian education system “an embarrassment” during a Congressional hearing on the topic. Among many other provisions, it calls for addressing the more than $2 billion in facilities repairs needed to bring all BIE schools up to “acceptable” condition and recruiting private partners to help cover the costs needed to upgrade grossly outdated technology infrastructures in many of the schools.

The BIE is overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is housed within the U.S. Department of the Interior. Only about 7 percent of the nation’s American Indian and Alaska Native students are served in BIE-funded schools.

The blueprint also urges the administration to request that Congress fully fund the operational costs budget for the tribally controlled schools overseen by the BIE. Currently, the BIE provides 67 percent of such costs, often forcing tribal educators to dip into instructional funds for basics like heating. The current BIE budget for its K-12 schools is roughly $800 million””with about $200 million of that coming from the U.S. Department of Education in the form of Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants. Current enrollment in the fragmented system is 48,000 students.

Most American Indian children are enrolled in regular public school districts, many of them on reservations or adjacent to tribal lands. Those schools rely disproportionately on federal dollars””known as impact aid””to help make up for tax revenue lost because reservation lands are nontaxable. Cody Two Bears, a member of the tribal council for the Standing Rock Nation, urged Mr. Obama during the president’s visit to the reservation not to overlook the importance of protecting the needs of impact-aid schools, which were hit hard by the cuts to federal education spending brought on by the recent budget sequestration.

Tribal resistance prompted the study group to drop its original proposal to create a Race to the Top-like competitive-grant program for tribal schools that agreed to adopt policies such as teacher evaluations tied in part to student test scores. Instead, the blueprint calls for the development of “incentive grants” that would encourage tribal schools to adopt best practices that BIE officials help identify in other tribally and agency-controlled schools.

And while the blueprint’s authors originally envisioned a revamped BIE developing robust recruitment and retention strategies for talented teachers and principals, the final plan focuses more on beefing up professional-development opportunities for educators already working in the schools. During the next three years, the administration will cover the costs for teachers and other instructional-staff members in BIE schools who wish to pursue the rigorous certification process offered by the National Board for Teacher Certification.

 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by the year 2060:

• the population of those over 85 will have grown by over 200 percent,
• the population of those 65 and over will have grown by over 100 percent,
• the total population will have grown by less than about 45 percent.

So who will teach? Who will learn? And who will pay for our schools?

More U.S. high school students are staying in school, according to newly released data from the Census Bureau as the national dropout rate reached a record low last year. Just 7% of the nation’s 18-to-24 year olds had dropped out of high school, continuing a steady decline in the nation’s dropout rate since 2000, when 12% of youth were dropouts.

Fourteen percent of Hispanics dropped out, 8 percent Black population, 5 percent Non-Hispanic Whites and 4 percent Asians dropped out. (The status dropout rate refers to the share of 18- to 24-year olds who were not enrolled in school and had not completed high school.)  Source: U.S. Census Bureau October Current Population Survey

The decline in the national dropout rate has been driven, in part, by substantially fewer Hispanic and black youth dropping out of school (the non-Hispanic white dropout rate has not fallen as sharply). Although Hispanics still have the highest dropout rate among all major racial and ethnic groups, it reached a record-low of 14% in 2013, compared with 32% of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds who were dropouts in 200Not only are fewer Hispanics dropping out of high school, but more are finishing high school and attending college. The only exception is that Hispanics continue to substantially trail white youth in obtaining bachelor’s degrees.

The decline in the size of the Hispanic dropout population has been particularly noteworthy because it’s happened at the same time that the Hispanic youth population is growing. The number of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-old dropouts peaked at 1.5 million in 2001 and fell to 889,000 by 2013, even though the size of the Hispanic youth population has grown by more than 50% since 2000. The last time the Census Bureau counted fewer than 900,000 Hispanic dropouts was in 1987.

Aside from the Great Recession, the trend in more Hispanic youth staying in school is occurring against the backdrop of diminishing job opportunities for less-educated workers, including less-educated Hispanic workers. Hispanic students and their families may be responding to the rising returns to a college education by staying in school.

Census data show that Hispanics have reached a record high school completion rate.

Among Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds, 79% had completed high school compared with 60% who did so in 2000. High school completion rates have also been rising for other racial and ethnic groups, but their rates were not at record highs in 2013.

Hispanics have also made progress in college enrollment at two- and four-year schools. Among college students ages 18 to 24, Hispanics accounted for 18% of college enrollment in 2013, up from 12% as recently as 2009, according to the census data.

The dropout rate for black youth also was at a record low in 2013 (8%) and has fallen by nearly half since 2000 (15%). Blacks comprised 16% of the nation’s public school students in 2013, with that share projected to fall to 15% by 2022.

Among non-Hispanic white youth, the dropout rate has also declined since 2000 to 5% in 2013.

Asian youth continue to be the major racial group with the lowest high school dropout rate (4% in 2013), but it was not at a record low last year.

What are the factors which caused the dropout rate to fall?  Could it be that the recession and the lack of employment possibilities caused the decline?  Also, what the survey doesn’t show is the individual state dropout rate; it is only based on national data.  In addition, the increase in graduation rate doesn’t indicate the competency or the college and career readiness of the school completers.