As Graduation Rates Rise, a Call to Focus on Nurturing Students
By John Thompson.
The good news is that graduation rates are improving across the nation (see this announcement from a few days ago.) The best news is that social science points the way to even greater progress.
Ironically, corporate school reformers, who have focused obsessively on improving student “achievement” as measured by test scores, are now shifting attention to graduation rates and away from their failure to improve teaching and learning. Although this pivot is public relations-driven, designed to distract from the lack of gains produced by their competition-driven mandates, educators should welcome it and offer to work collaboratively with anyone who will help improve children’s life prospects.
We must also remind the non-education press that the fundamental reason for test-driven reform, supposedly, was that accountability hawks demanded “output-driven” mandates to replace “input-driven” school improvement. The effort to raise graduation rates is a classic input-driven reform, and it still works.
As Jack Jennings reminds us, the old-fashioned input-driven policies that preceded standards and testing were not perfect. The old progressive efforts to build student supports became underfunded, but they produced positive results that are greater than the expensive accountability-driven pedagogies that were supposedly more tough-minded. Now, as University of Chicago researchers are once again showing, those classic methods of investing in mentors and counselors still work, and the path to school improvement requires trusting, loving relationship-building, not winners and losers.
To further prepare students for a meaningful and healthy life, we must heed the findings of Don’t Quit on Me, by The Center for Promise at America’s Promise Alliance. It begins with the seemingly unchallengeable As Graduation Rates Rise, a Call to Focus on Nurturing Students - Living in Dialogue:
