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As many of you know, I have been doing research on the global school non-completion rate.  I believe that the lack of education is at the root of most of the world’s problems.  Yet as countries examine their critical economic crises, the ignore the long term critical problem of school achievement and completion.  As Thomas Friedman in his brilliant book, The World Is Flat pointed out, “A student in Bangalore, India is now as globally competitive as a student in Bangore, Maine.”   Mr. Friedman spends many pages discussing the need for globally competitive school systems.  The best graduates from New York City schools are not competing for jobs with the best graduates of Montreal schools but the best graduates in the world.  The economic success of India and China is based, to a large degree on their ability to focus improvement on their school systems.  If a nation wishes to be globally competitive, then it stands to reason that they must improve their school achievement and completion.  Yet when we look at the completion rate of some of the world’s nations, we see a vast chasm.  Let us look at a few countries using data from the United Nations, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, and Oxfam.

In Canada:  9.8% dropout per year.

In  Singapore: 1.6% dropout per year

In Morocco: many children in rural areas do not attend school even though it is free and compulsory through primary school.  Literacy rates are estimated at 39 percent among women and 64 percent among men.  The female literacy rate in rural areas among women is estimated to be only ten percent.

In the Philippines: 5.7% per year

In India only 80% of the country go to school, 46% graduate

In Japan 84% graduate

In Fiji, 15% graduate from primary school

In South Korea, 71% graduate.

In Brazil, 14% dropout

In the UK, 64% graduate.

In Germany 83% graduate

Ireland has a 60 percent graduation rate.

How can a nation address its short term economic problem without addressing its long term education problem?

When Congress convenes one of the things it will have to address is the much postponed revision of the Elementary and Secondary School Act (No Child Left Behind).

I have mixed feeling about No Child.  There are several positive notes in the legislation.  First, who can argue with the objective that any child should be left behind?  Second, districts have to dis-aggregate graduation rate data by ethnicity, special education, and economic levels.  This means that schools can no longer & “hide under the rug” the disparities in graduation rates between minority groups and their higher achieving groups.

But No Child was developed to produce a global American Education Standard and it has failed to do so.  A simple high-stakes assessment is indicative of nothing.  Imagine that you go to a doctor and she tells you based on a single test you are going to die an extremely painful prolonged death.  We would seek an additional doctor and request additional testing.

States control educational standards and some state standards are extremely low while others are much higher.  “Good” high performing schools are supposed to receive additional  funding under the current legislation while “poor” low performing schools are to be punished.  Isn’t that backwards?  Shouldn’t low performing schools be given additional resources (more funding, smaller classes and more teachers) to help them raise their achievement levels comparable to those higher performing schools?

Low performing schools are supposed to allow students to transfer out to higher performing schools.  Yet in many cities, the number who wish to transfer out exceeds the available space.

The new Congress and the new Secretary of Education will have a difficult job especially in light of the current national economic crisis.  We wish them well.  The future of America depends on their response.

I want to thank all of you who read this blog.  You have made this past year my greatest intellectually productive in my life.  Those of you who subscribed (easy to do by registering on the right side of this page) know that I am now posting a blog two times a week.  By the end of the month, there will be three postings a week.

For those of you submitting comments, suggestions and reactions (at [email protected]) I want to thank you for taking some of your valuable time for your suggestions.

The year just passed produced two new books.  The first, 152 Ways to Keep Students in School (the first 26 ways are posted on the resource section of this website) as well as my publisher’s (Eye on Education’s Website, www.eyeoneducation.com) is the fastest selling of all my books.  From At-Risk to Academic Excellence:  What Successful Leaders Do, is the first book in a new series.  I have been blessed by two extremely talented co-authors, Dr. Tony Thacker and John Bell both from the Alabama Department of Education.  Dr. Gene Bottoms, Senior Vice President of the Southern Regional Education Lab (SREB) wrote the forward.  You can find the forward and Chapter 4 of the book on my website.

Creating School Cultures That Embrace Learning:  What Successful Leaders Do is the second book in the series and will be published in early February by Eye on Education.  In the Leadership and Culture book, we asked the leaders of 90/90/90 schools to explain their success in increasing student achievement and produced a positive school culture.  A section of the book will appear on these pages in February.

I have been traveling and presenting workshops around the country.  In 2008, I presented for over 6,000 people in Texas, Savannah, Atlanta, Texas (again), South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas (still again), Kentucky, Texas (once again), Florida, Arkansas, Calgary, New Orleans and Texas.

This year promises to be just as active starting with Clearwater Florida this month.  I have signed contracts to be back in Savannah, San Diego, Phoenix, Virginia, North Dakota and Texas.  If I am in your neighborhood, please come up and say hello. I really love presenting and meeting field-based people.

This year I produced several new activities.  Failure has been receiving the greatest reaction of them all.

I am currently working on several books.  Volume Two of the highly successful Best Practices to Help At-risk Learners is currently being worked on.  In addition, there will be a new administrators book and several other projects.

Finally I want to thank you for your hard work this past year. In spite of the demands of high-stakes testing, and No Child Left Behind, you have persevered against enormous challenges.  Thank you for all that you do.  Thank you for making a difference.

Stay well and stay in touch.

Franklin

I wish you and yours a glorious Christmas, a happy Chanukah, and a happy Kwanzaa,  a happy, HEALTHY, and prosperous New Year.  And may the New Year bring a year of peace.

See you in the New Year.

Franklin

Even though the current administration has a few days left, Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education in the Bush Administration has issued new regulations to make schools more accountable for high school dropout rates. All states will need to implement a uniform tracking system to determine how many students graduate on time and how many drop out. Schools have used a variety of methods to report dropouts, graduates, and transfers, many of which underestimated dropout rates and inflated graduation rates, according to the federal government.

The rules also require raising graduation rates for all students, including minorities and students with special needs. A school might have a high overall graduation rate, but still have a low rate for minority students or those with disabilities. States are allowed to set their own targets for improvement, and the federal government cannot force states to set more ambitious goals. But U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said it can make states accountable publicly for failing to graduate more students.

www.ed.gov

According to a new report from the United States Department of Agriculture, some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, even before this year’s sharp economic downtown.

The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn’t have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.

Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food supply at some point and classifies them as having “very low food security.” Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was described as having “food insecurity with hunger.”

The findings should increase pressure to meet President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to expand food aid and end childhood hunger by 2015, said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group.

Among other findings:

_The families with the highest rates of food insecurity were headed by single mothers (30.2 percent), black households (22.2 percent), Hispanic households (20.1 percent), and households with incomes below the official poverty line (37.7 percent).

_States with families reporting the highest prevalence of food insecurity during 2005-2007 were Mississippi (17.4 percent), New Mexico (15 percent), Texas (14.8 percent) and Arkansas (14.4 percent).

_The highest growth in food insecurity over the last 9 years came in Alaska and Iowa, both of which saw a 3.7 percent increase in families who struggled to eat adequately or had substantial food disruptions.

Source:

• https://ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR66/ERR66.pdf

Educators know that students who are hungry have a difficult time studying and learning.  Schools may have to pick up the slack when parents are unable to feed themselves and their children.

For students who graduate high school in the bottom 40 percent of their class, college is usually a waste of money.  More than two-thirds of such students who enroll as freshmen fail to earn a college degree.  Colleges admit that these ill-prepare students are accepted,  then the colleges re-mediate them and cash their tuition payments but do little to prepare them for the real world.  When these students dropout, they leave campuses with a mountain of debt from student loans, lowered self-esteem and unprepared for work.

Then, knowing this, why do colleges accept them?  Colleges need to fill their seats and use tuition monies to fund other projects.

College dropout rates exceed K-12 dropouts with students who successfully graduated from high school.

What are students and parents to do?  Probably go to a career-oriented community college or enrolling in job-train programs given by some corporations.

Source:  The Chronicle of Higher Education

A report issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics:  The Status and Trends in the Education of American Indians and Alaska Natives: 2008 examines both the educational progress of American Indian/Alaska Native children and adults and challenges in their education. This report shows that over time more American Indian/Alaska Native students have gone on to college and that their attainment expectations have increased. Despite these gains, progress has been uneven and differences persist between American Indian/Alaska Native students and students of other racial/ethnic groups on key indicators of educational performance.

Preprimary, Elementary, and Secondary Education

During the 2005?06 school year, some 644,000 public elementary and secondary school students, or about 1 percent of all public school students, were American Indian/Alaska Native.  During 2006″“07, Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools served nearly 48,500 American Indian/Alaska Native students. In 2006, some 14 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native children were served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which was a higher percentage than the percentage of children in all racial/ethnic groups. In comparison, 9 percent of the general population was served under IDEA. (Indicator 2.3)  A larger percentage (66 percent) of American Indian/Alaska Native 8th-grade students reported absences from school in the preceding month than 8th-grade students of any other race/ethnicity in 2007 (36 to 57 percent). In 2004, American Indian/Alaska Native students in grades kindergarten through 12 had a lower suspension rate (7 percent) than Black students (15 percent), but a higher rate than students of all other racial/ethnic groups. In 2006, a smaller percentage of American Indian/Alaska Native students (75 percent) reported receiving a high school diploma than White (91 percent) and Asian/Pacific Islander students (93 percent). In 2006, only Hispanic young adults had a higher status dropout rate (21 percent) than American Indian/Alaska Native young adults (15 percent). Status dropout rates represent the percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds who are out of school and who have not earned a high school diploma or General Educational Development (GED) credential. A smaller percentage of American Indian/Alaska Native 2-year-olds than 2-year-olds in all other groups demonstrated specific cognitive skills in vocabulary, listening comprehension, matching, and counting in 2003″“04.  For example, 74 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native children demonstrated receptive vocabulary, compared to 84 percent of all children. (Indicator 4.1)  On the 2007 4th- and 8th-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics assessments, American Indian/Alaska Native students generally scored lower than White and Asian/Pacific Islander students but not measurably different from Hispanic students. (Indicators 4.2  A higher percentage of American Indian/Alaska Native high school graduates completed core academic high school coursework in 2005 (36 percent) than in 1982 (3 percent). However, these percentages were smaller than the comparable percentages for the total population of students (52 percent in 2005 and 10 percent in 1982). On the sections measuring critical reading and mathematics of the 2007 SAT college entrance exam, American Indian/Alaska Native students scored lower than the national average, but higher than Black and Hispanic students. In critical reading, American Indians/Alaska Natives had an average score of 497, which was higher than the scores for Black students (433) and Mexican American students (455), but lower than the overall average (502).  In 2007, 78 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native 8th-graders in public schools reported using a computer at home, which was lower than the percentage for 8th-graders of any other racial/ethnic group (82 to 96 percent). In 2007, greater than 25 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native children in grades 4 and 8 reported use of a traditional language within the family at least half of the time.

At grade 4, some 31 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native students attending high density
schools (in which American Indians/Alaska Natives made up at least a fourth of the
enrollment) had administrators who reported visits by American Indian/Alaska Native
community members to share traditions and culture three or more times during the school
year, compared to 9 percent in low density schools. Higher percentages of American Indian/Alaska
Native students in schools in which American Indians/Alaska Natives made up at least a fourth of the enrollment had administrators who reported specific problems in school climate than did American Indian/Alaska Native students in lower density schools. In 2007, 4th- and 8th-grade students in these high density schools had administrators who reported serious problems with student absenteeism, student tardiness, lack of family involvement, and low expectations. In 2006, some 21 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native children between the ages of 12 and 17 reported the use of alcohol in the past month, compared to 11 percent of Black and 8 percent of Asian children who did so.