In Practice

Doug Noon, in another well written piece dissects the problems with Reading First in Borderland » Blog Archive » Reclaiming Education. The landmark federal legislation provides funding for reading programs that adhere to the feds guidelines. As Doug points out, the criteria for “scientifically proven” reading methodology wasn’t well, very scientific.

He also points out an article from Susan Harman and Deborah Meier on how this is part of a larger plan to discredit educators, and bring “marketplace” reforms to education. I’ll leave that story to Doug, and Ms. Harman, and Meier.

I thought of that piece when I looked at my local paper which had a story on Three of Sac City’s small schools for at-risk teens have some of region’s highest dropout rates – at sacbee.com

Much of the arguments for recent education reform have centered on “drop-out” factories, and “failing schools”. I liked how the article drilled down into some of the figures for local small high schools, and here is my “money quote”:

That school’s dropout rate was 38 percent – a figure that former principal Judy Billingsley said she questions.

But she remembers a number of students who quit school because of pressures at home. Some went to Mexico with their families over Christmas break and never came back. Several boys left to support pregnant girlfriends. One girl replaced school with a job so she could pay her own rent and leave an abusive home.

“When you’re trying to survive … survival is first,” Billingsley said.

Now, these schools are not without their problems, as the article shows, but people often wonder what happens to these kids, where they go, and why they go there. Often they blame schools and teachers. Maybe what we have is not schools that are drop-out factories, but instead communities, societies, and economies that are the drop-out factories.