Retooling Schools: Who Gets to Graduate?
Today, San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club of California hosted a very interesting, relevant and engaging panel discussion about the severe dropout crisis in California public schools. It’s always exciting to be part of these exchanges, where I can see that people really DO care about making improvements to our broken system and DO care about making education work for all youth, across learning abilities, language capacities, and geographies.
The event is part of the Club’s Innovations in Education program, and in addition to YouthNoise, the audience was mostly comprised of journalists from major dailies like The San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, and Oakland Tribune, along with smaller media groups like New American Media, which publishes YO! Youth Outlook (San Francisco), De-Bug (Silicon Valley), and The KNOW (Fresno). (The latter was one of our partners at the recent Fresno Youth Summit!)
The event began with 15 minute presentations from each panelist. The panelists came from a very diverse cross-section of players from the education world: Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project, Laurene Powell Jobs, co-founder and president of the board for College Track, and Nidya Baez, co-founder of the Youth Empowerment School (YES!).
Russell gave a short powerpoint presentation that higlighted these main points:
- The drop-out problem is severe.
- The problem is concentrated
- Causes are students, families, and schools.
- Solutions are difficult to determine because there is such bad data from the State.
I learned a lot of interested (and sobering!) statistics from his presentation like:
- The drop-out rate in California is the lowest it has been in 10 years!
- 15% of students are English Language Learners (ELL), but 30% of dropouts are ELL.
- Out of one cohort of 20-year olds, there are 120,000 drop out.
His project is releasing a report on dropouts on February 27, 2008 available on his website: lmri.ucsb.edu/dropouts. This report will hopefully inform legislators, like Senator Darryl Steinberg — who has personally taken it upon himself to address the dropout problem in California — to take action and provide solutions. Solutions that, Dr. Rumberger said, may not necessarily be hindered by the current budget crisis. Some of these solutions include changing the standards and improving our data systems. The latter is already an agenda items for the State, but Rumberger says that more even more improvements have to be made than those proposed.
Laurene Powell Jobs represents an after-school program that prepares under-resourced high school students for higher education. With 3 centers in the Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland, and East Palo Alto), their program has 90% of their students going to college. She really spoke to the need for a huge amount of increase in per pupil spending and the ways in which community groups can work to provided resources to aid in the dropout problem.
Finally, we heard from Nidya Baez, a former alumni of Fremont High School who created a vision for a new school dedicated to the empowerment minority youth. The new school, Youth Empowerment School (YES!), focuses on authentic lessons and assessment, with fully 84 percent of their students qualifies to apply for a 4-year institution. Nidya really spoke to the need to build student projects around where their need is and not solely focus on what is lacking or what they need. For example, at her high school, they implemented a business program to sell hot lunches on the school campus to help resolve a severe truancy problem. This program met the need for students to have healthy alternatives to the cafeteria food, reasons to stay on campus post-lunch, and opportunities to use students’ skills at counting money, processing food orders, and all the other operational duties that the program required. Overall, her story was one of success for youth leaders!
The final part of the event centered around a larger group discussion about what issues were missing from the front pages of the newspapers about education. What stories are not being told? There was lively debate and discussion about immigration, multiple pathways post-high school vs. college, shortages in math and science teachers, and the struggle to raise expectation of students. Perhaps that most compelling idea for me was the need to re-educate the masses about 1) the crisis that public education (like the health system) is in in this country and 2) using this re-education as a catalyst for galvanizing a social movement to improve education.
Of course, when hearing about re-education and social movements, I immediately thought about Right To Learn. Here we are doing just that! One voice that I thought was missing today was the youth voice — our voices speaking to all these issues and informing the research and policy recommendations from Dr. Rumberger. One thing is clear: there aren’t enough opportunities for youth to participate in these discussions. Well, I hope that through Right To Learn, we can really seize the opportunity ourselves to speak up, be loud, and be heard!
Tags: college bound, Darryl Steinberg, dropout rates, education, policy, youth empowerment school
