PREVENTING DROPOUTS IS EASY:
"PREVENTING DROPOUTS IS EASY
By John Jensen, Ph.D."
"It is a good thing," my father told me, "to know what you are doing."
This thought is relevant to the unhappy condition of education in the US. We need look no further for the reason than the very focus of the just-released study about dropouts, “Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools.” The three major factors, from which clues are extracted for understanding what practices to apply, are “patterns of geographic spread and concentration; state, district, and school characteristics; and socioeconomic, demographic, and political trends in the community.” That such effort has been applied to something so far off the mark is a symptom of the problem itself.
Studying correlations of external conditions with numbers of dropouts is nearly useless. If his peer group, or his mother, or his probation officer were such and such, or said this or that, what we really want to know is How did he respond?
If his probation officer was overheard saying, "I think he's on his way to a lifetime in prison," or his mother told him "No point in getting an education," or his peer group said "Hey, we got some really great stuff you'll like," the point isn't that we can correlate these messages with how many believe them and eventually lose their way. What's important is the difference between those and the others who say "All those people are screwed up. The guys in my class are screwed up. My mother is screwed up, and my probation officer is screwed up. I'm going to get my degree and get out of this sick place."
What's decisive isn't what happens to him or goes into him. What's decisive is how he personally responds. The implication of this is that we cease exploring among generalities and look at how we are guiding his particular response to external conditions.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10648603/The-High-Cost-of-High-School-Dropouts-What-the-Nation-Pays-for-Inadequate-High-Schools
"PREVENTING DROPOUTS IS EASY
By John Jensen, Ph.D."
"It is a good thing," my father told me, "to know what you are doing."
This thought is relevant to the unhappy condition of education in the US. We need look no further for the reason than the very focus of the just-released study about dropouts, “Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools.” The three major factors, from which clues are extracted for understanding what practices to apply, are “patterns of geographic spread and concentration; state, district, and school characteristics; and socioeconomic, demographic, and political trends in the community.” That such effort has been applied to something so far off the mark is a symptom of the problem itself.
Studying correlations of external conditions with numbers of dropouts is nearly useless. If his peer group, or his mother, or his probation officer were such and such, or said this or that, what we really want to know is How did he respond?
If his probation officer was overheard saying, "I think he's on his way to a lifetime in prison," or his mother told him "No point in getting an education," or his peer group said "Hey, we got some really great stuff you'll like," the point isn't that we can correlate these messages with how many believe them and eventually lose their way. What's important is the difference between those and the others who say "All those people are screwed up. The guys in my class are screwed up. My mother is screwed up, and my probation officer is screwed up. I'm going to get my degree and get out of this sick place."
What's decisive isn't what happens to him or goes into him. What's decisive is how he personally responds. The implication of this is that we cease exploring among generalities and look at how we are guiding his particular response to external conditions.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10648603/The-High-Cost-of-High-School-Dropouts-What-the-Nation-Pays-for-Inadequate-High-Schools