Last night in the State of the Union address, President Obama directly addressed the dropout crisis:

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

Forcing students who want out to stick around will have limited returns. Reversing the dropout crisis, a crucial goal, would take a extraordinarily comprehensive effort to undo the systemic elements to facilitate students’ decisions to walk away from school. Many young people (7,000 per day; 30% of all students) may wait until high school to disappear physically, but the damage that ultimately manifests in dropping out has likely been done much earlier in their lives.

Russell W. Rumberger has answers. The University of California professor has written Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It, published last year by Harvard University Press. In the Washington Post, Jay Mathews called it a “masterpiece” and summarized Rumberger’s key takeaways on how to reverse the dropout crisis:

1. Redefine high school success. The measure of a school should not be just mastery of reading, writing and math, but what are called noncognitive skills, such as motivation, perseverance, risk aversion, self-esteem and self-control. This would help both potential dropouts and kids going to college who need work on their social skills.

2.Change the dropout accounting system so schools aren’t rewarded for transferring problem kids. Even students who spend only a semester in the ninth grade before transferring to another school should be counted when the original school calculates how many ninth-graders completed high school four years later. Otherwise, schools will have an incentive to send students most likely to drop out to other schools rather than try to help them.

3. Stop trying to improve schools by forcing them to change their practices over the short term. Instead, help them build their capacity to improve, with more money and staff, over the long term.

4. Work harder to desegregate schools. Rumberger cites a study that found two-thirds of high schools with more than 90 percent minority enrollment had fewer than 60 percent of their students remain in school from ninth to 12th grade. “In short,” he writes, “it matters with whom one goes to school.”

5. Strengthen families and communities. Compared with other developed countries, the United States has one of the highest rates of children living in poverty. Those are the kids most susceptible to dropping out. Anything that improves the health and job security of school neighborhoods improves graduation rates. More early children education and preschool are also useful.

Sign me up as a supporter. The Obama Adminstration should be all over this!

Georgia may still be reeling from the eye-popping cheating scandal uncovered this year in Atlanta, but things are getting worse.

The governor’s Special Investigations division has just released a bombshell report detailing systemic corruption in the administration of the state exans, I’ve reprinted most of the overview below. Check out the whole crazy thing here and here.

How can anyone say with a straight face that these are just bad apples and this high-stakes testing regime is the right thing for kids?

(The italics and bold print below are mine. Hat tip to Bob Schaeffer at FairTest for the links.) 

The disgraceful situation we found in the Dougherty County School System (DCSS) is a tragedy, sadly illustrated by a comment made by a teacher who said that her fifth grade students could not read, yet did well on the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). This incredible statement from a teacher in a school where the principal flatly refused to cooperate with our investigation is indicative of what we found in many of the schools we visited.

To our amazement, this top-level administrator would not even answer questions about how she mishandled her duties as the person who is most responsible, at that school, for overseeing all testing activity. 

Another school principal, whose salary was over $90,000 per year, allowed her family to falsely claim that they were eligible for a federally-funded free lunch each school day, even though official guidelines required the annual income to be no more than $24,089.  

Yet another principal, with regard to our interviews, told a teacher:  “Don’t you tell them anything, you hear?”   

Notwithstanding these examples of misconduct, there are skilled, dedicated and well-meaning educators in this school system.  But their work is often overshadowed by an acceptance of wrongdoing and a pattern of incompetence that 1is a blight on the community that will feel its effects for generations to come.   This is the Dougherty County School System.        

Hundreds of school children were harmed by extensive cheating in the Dougherty County School System. In 11 schools, 18 educators admitted to cheating.  We found cheating on the 2009 CRCT in all of the schools we examined.  A total of 49 educators were involved in some form of misconduct or failure to perform their duty with regard to this test.     

While we did not find that Superintendent Sally Whatley or her senior staff knew that crimes or other misconduct were occurring, they should have known and were ultimately responsible for accurately testing and assessing students in this system.  In that duty, they failed.  

The 2009 erasure analysis, and other evidence, suggests that there were far more educators involved in cheating, but a fair analysis of the facts did not allow us to sufficiently establish the identity of every participant.  

The statistics, and the individual student data, leave little room for any other reasonable explanation, save for cheating.  For example, the percentage of flagged classrooms for DCSS is ten times higher than the state average.   

Where’s Hunter S. Thompson when you need him? Our national discourse has gone gonzo, hijacked by maniacs. 

I’ve done my best to tune out the cynical cluelessness permeating the Republican primary race, but these guys are actively working to ruin the country. It’s hard to single out only a few howlers, but just this month we’ve seen:

Mitt Romney: brazen distortion and lies about President Obama’s positions

Herman Cain: knew from the beginning this was only about self-promotion

Rick Perry: wants to radically reform government but can’t remember how. (Oops.)

New Gingrich: Child labor laws are in the way of really making our economy work.

The disingenuousness takes your breath away.

I feel an indirect link between these out-of-touch corporatist ideologues and a New York Daily News story by Ben Chapman this week on the insane new expansion in New York State testing. Check out this lunacy:

State Education officials are expanding mandatory reading exams that students across the state take each spring, according to documents posted on a state website Monday.

Third graders would spend 245 minutes on a reading test given over two consecutive days in April 2012 — up from 150 minutes over two days last year. Other grades will see similar gains.

Teachers and parents slammed the state’s new, super-sized testing schedule.

“It’s insane to make third graders sit still and take a test for that long,” said Lisa North, a reading teacher at Public School 8 in Brooklyn who administers the tests. 

I truly don’t know what’s next in this brave new world: four-hour reading tests in second grade? Why not in first grade too? Why not a three hour reading test in kindergarten? Capture the data early! Where is this all leading? How much of our soul are we selling in the name of data?

No one wins here— except for-profit corporations selling tests and test prep. (And privatizers who cheer the demise of public education.)

I recently received an email from Peggy Robertson, an administrator for the grass roots group United Opt Out National. They’ve got something strong to say about this.

I recently had dinner with a couple who were incredibly smart, friendly, funny… and conservative. They are active members of Tea Party organizations. My politics range from pretty liberal to very liberal, and I gravitate to the like-minded, so our candid conversation hit me as a shock to the system.

Since I’m a teacher and we all have opinions about education, the inevitable, guaranteed, stone-cold-lock cocktail party question was posed to me:

So Dan, what do you think of Michelle Rhee?

I find it really hard to give a short answer to this question. I’m critical of many of Rhee’s policies and I believe her legacy (hushed-up cheating scandals, stagnant test scores, disenfranchised parents, alienated veteran teachers, a viciously anti-union ideology) is problematic.

This tends not to go over well with the ballroom set who have been conditioned to revere her brand by Waiting for Superman and cover stories in Time and Newsweek. So I start with the positive: the status quo was no good and Rhee brought much-needed attention into DC Public Schools. She got people talking about school reform.

As I was falling all over myself in an attempt to be even-handed, diplomatic, and still true to my beliefs, the couple politely and directly asserted their vision for inner-city education.

It involves (and I’m paraphrasing as best I can):

• Allowing individuals to donate to private charities that will choose how to allocate funds in schools;

• Narrowing the vision of the school day to teach basic skills reading and math (and occasionally the arts) while providing two good meals per day;

• Eliminating all government assistance programs because they enable laziness and bad parenting;

• Encouraging all parents to get jobs.

Each suggestion contained a grain of reasonableness surrounded by skewed assumptions and a vision shaped by ideology rather than understanding. We were at the same dinner table but evidently living in two different universes. When one side believes that all public funds are at best suspect, and at worst actively ruining society, it’s hard to imagine truly strengthening a public school system.

When careers hinge on statistics, corruption is never far away. Last month Bronx high school principal Janet Saraceno resigned in the midst of a grade-changing scandal in which dozens of students allegedly received credit— and then diplomas— that they didn’t really earn. Improving the graduation rate would have earned the principal a $25,000 bonus.

In districts across the country— most notably in Atlanta— cheating scandals in schools are shocking and outraging the public. The outrage is justified— cheating is wrong— but what if the rules of the game are crooked? What if these scandals don’t represent isolated bad apples, but rather a public surfacing of evidence that we’re reforming our system in the wrong direction?

Public schools in the U.S. badly need reform. In report after report, we see our kids slipping behind their counterparts abroad. The status quo isn't defensible. Top-performing nations like Finland and Singapore have upgraded into world class operations their school systems that were middling just 3 decades ago. America is pouring money and resources into reforming its schools, but the stats are persistently sliding in the opposite direction.

Let’s compare five facets of our system with Finland and Singapore.

#1: Teacher Recruitment & Training

In Finland and Singapore, it’s highly competitive to become a teacher. If accepted, teachers go through rigorous and fully subsidized training. All teachers have at least a Master’s degree.

In America, there is a patchwork of programs and certifications that can ultimately put someone in front of students. A Bachelor’s degree is required, but little else for an alternative certification teacher. There are vast fluctuations in quality between teacher preparation programs. Top-tier programs like Teachers College, Columbia University (my alma-mater) cost around $50,000 for a 38-credit, 12-month program. That’s prohibitive for most would-be great teachers, particularly because starting teacher salaries aren’t high enough to pay off student loans and maintain a solid middle-class life.

#2: Teachers’ Unions

In Finland and Singapore, teachers are one hundred percent unionized. This is not controversial in those countries. The unions and ministries of education share collaborative, positive relationships. It’s common and even encouraged for educators in Singapore to transition seamlessly from working in the classroom to working for the government to working for the government.

In America, the percentage of teachers who belong to a union continues to decrease. Teachers’ unions are frequently caricatured as the villains in education. (See Waiting for Superman and check out its army of supporters if you think this is hyperbole.) The default relationship between American teachers’ unions and school districts is one of mistrust if not outright contempt like in Washington, D.C. during Michelle Rhee’s tenure.

#3: Teachers’ Workload

In Finland and Singapore. the average teaching load is 20 hours with students per week. Teachers have ample time to plan, collaborate with colleagues, and provide substantive feedback on student work.

In America, the average teaching load is 30 hours in front of students per week— 50 percent higher than that of the top-performing nations. Many American teachers feel perpetually swamped by work, struggling to keep up with the volume of out-of-classroom responsibilities (lesson-planning, grading, meetings, professional development, paperwork, contacting parents, etc.). According to recent NEA data, teachers report “heavy workload” as the number one hindrance to quality teaching.

#4: Testing & Assessment

In Finland and Singapore, there are high-stakes tests prior to the college application process. There are no high-stakes decisions attached to standardized tests.

In America, high-stakes testing begins in early elementary school and continues until graduation. Preparing for and taking standardized assessments engulfs a significant portion of students’ time, distorting curricula. More and more, educators’ livelihoods depend on test scores. “This push on tests is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.” Riverdale Country School Headmaster Dominic Randolph says in the lede of Paul Tough’s recent cover story for The New York Times Magazine.

#5: Funding

In Finland and Singapore, education funding is considered a sacred priority. At the Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning annual conference, Mike Thiruman, president of the Singapore Teachers Union proudly said: “During a recession, every department deals with budget cuts except education. The education budget actually goes up.”

In America, per pupil funding varies greatly across school districts. Thousands of teachers have been laid off in the aftermath of the Great Recession, often fomenting generational warfare over who deserves the pink slip. Investment in education is a topic of constant argument for policy makers.

*****

These considerations take a toll on American teachers and students. Many educators are stressed out and pressured to focus on myopic goals. Deepening poverty means more and more students are hungry, sick, transient, truant, lacking access to healthy food, exposed to drug use, living in unsafe neighborhoods, or steeped in family crisis. Principal Saraceno’s ill-advised alleged grade tampering is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to dysfunction in schools.

So where is the hope?

Education is a long-term, personal endeavor. Scrutinizing year-to-year test scores is the wrong way to find out what’s really happening in schools. The students in my fourth grade class at the Bronx’s P.S. 85, described in my memoir The Great Expectations School, are vivid examples of the dangers of reducing young people to simple data.

We should take a cue from the top-performing nations I discussed above. We should use tests as just one element in a variety of assessments and no single element should carry such weight that it could ruin a teacher’s professional life or single-handedly doom a student to repeat the year. Examples of more authentic assessments include portfolios of student work and “exhibitions” developed by the Coalition for Essential Schools that resemble a graduate thesis defense. Those systems involve a closer personal look at what students can do, and education is a personal endeavor.

Corporations that create tests or sell test prep programs have seen a bump in their bottom lines thanks the explosion of high-stakes testing in American public schools. The rest of us are seeing an under-achieving generation of students, a teaching force fleeing the profession in droves, and incendiary reports about a few bad apple cheaters.