Ed Augustus: No Silver Bullet to Fixing High School Drop out Rates

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Friday, March 16, 2012

Ed Augustus, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

I’ve often said that while students make up 20% of our population they are 100% of our future. That future is one in which everyone who enters is going to need at least a high school education and then some in order to compete and succeed. We do not have the economy of the 1940’s and 50’s which could absorb 40+% high school drop- out rate. In that era there were many low skilled factory and farm jobs that could be had without a high school diploma and a person could earn a decent wage to provide for themselves and their families. Today those jobs have been either shipped overseas or replaced by technology. The likelihood that a student who drops out of high school before receiving a diploma will live in poverty is enormous and the implications for their families and the cost to taxpayers for the safety net services they will need over the course of their work lifetime are profound.

The recent legislation to raise the dropout age from 16 to 18 reminds me of the old adage, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. While few would doubt the logic of not allowing 16 year olds even with a parents’ permission making such a profound life choice as dropping out of school. My fear is that politicians will think they’ve addressed the drop out problem, pat themselves on the back and move on. While I was the Vice Chair of the Education Committee in the legislature we tried to look more substantively at why students are dropping out and how can we intervene to stop them before they are 16 or 18 years of age. Talk to any third grade teacher and they can tell you the students who are already firmly on the path to dropping out. The research backs this up. If you look at key indicators, such as failing one or more core subject areas, large numbers of absences, unstable homes, you can with 75% accuracy predict in the 3rd grade students that are likely to dropout out before finishing high school.

So the question is if students are telling us through these indicators that they are in trouble when they are 8 years old, are we paying attention? Then intervening with strategies that will change the path they are on? We cannot and should not give up on ANY student. The challenge is to look at the indicators as predictive of being at risk to drop out and then to have a system in place to that mitigate the factors that increase the likelihood of dropping out. We also need to appreciate that all students are not going to thrive in the traditional classroom environment and give our schools the flexibility and resources to provide different options for some of our students.

We have more than 8,000 students annually in Massachusetts that drop out at age 16, 17 and 18. In a ten year period that is 80,000 young people under the age of 30 unable to compete in our knowledge based economy. That number is larger than most cities in Massachusetts. We can’t settle for simple solutions, the stakes are just too high.

Unfortunately our politicians sometimes are looking for “silver bullet” solutions to complex problems. When you are dealing with reducing the high school dropout rate just arbitrarily tell students who otherwise want to drop out that they must stay is likely to have other negative consequences while doing next to nothing about increasing students successfully completing high school. This is one of those cases where we do know what works and we need to see this as a priority to invest the necessary resources in our students and our future.
 

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