…NOW IF ONLY THE ADULTS IN CHARGE WILL LISTEN.
Here’s the deal: A group of teenagers involved in a summer program at UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access spent most of June and July interviewing kids at some of the district’s most troubled high schools. Their aim was to find out why kids drop out, and what changes in the system might dissuade them from leaving.
Since the Los Angeles Unified School District is plagued with a dropout rate that hovers around fifty percent, this seemed like a worthy area of study.
The kids were directed in this project by the institutes’s head, Jeannie Oakes, an extremely smart woman who is also one of the state’s best known education researchers.
Oakes sent her new research teams-–all 10th and 11th graders—into East and South LA high schools like Locke, Roosevelt and Crenshaw, and told them to question students about what they believed was going wrong.
To better familiarize themselves with the stakes, the teams also studied the schools they visited before doing their field research. For example, about Roosevelt High School they learned, writes the Daily News….
…that 80 percent of nearly 2,000 ninth-graders surveyed four years ago said they had hopes of going on to college. Four years, later, only 39 of 100 students graduated. Even fewer were able to qualify for college.
The five teams presented their report on Friday to the mayor and his education advisors.
The common themes they found and the recommendations that resulted were as follows:
1. Hire more teachers “who care” and who relate individually to students.
2. Drastically reduce the number of kids in a classroom.
3. Stop promoting kids on to the next grade, when they’re failing the grade they’re in.
4. Make at least some class work relevant to the community life students see around them.
5. Understand that student safety—and the perception of safety-–is a huge factor when it comes to dropout causes. If kids don’t feel safe at school, or on their way to school, lots of students simply stop going.
As the LA Times noted:
The young researchers painted a grim picture of the downward spiral that often haunts dropouts: They said 80% of California’s prison population did not graduate from high school, a statistic that has appeared elsewhere in published reports. “You’re all sitting here listening to the research, but if you don’t do anything about it, then you’re part of the problem,” [15-year-old Carla] Hernandez, who researched Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles,
Smart kids.
Meanwhile the last I heard, the district’s big plan for combating drop out rates was to spend $8 million dollars on eighty “diploma project advisers” —whatever that means.
photo by Allen J. Schaben, LA Times
Reducing class size (2) is a nice idea, and one reason that many people do choose private schools; but it was so costly to reduce class sizes in K-3 alone, that the idea was considered and rejected. But if automatic promotion to next grade (3) were implemented, the most troublesome students would be removed from the next classroom, and the rest could concentrate better. I think (4) is excellent — incorporate some local content into social studies, geography, etc. But it seems the curriculum is so rigid right now statewide, that teachers complain about not having this sort of latitude. I’d also like to see a return to the old-fashioned non-college track as an option, apprentice- study skills like car mechanic/ woodworking/ craftsmanship/ culinary arts, like they have in Germany. Not all students are college material, so become frustrated and drop out without a skill. As for (1), some private schools do have a teacher who’s assigned to say ten kids, and follows them throughout, and is “there” for them; others have assistant deans who have office time available for drop-ins, and kids develop a relationship. These seem doable at public schools too, and without an exhorbitant cost.
I agree with their safety issue, and that’s what I’ve heard from kids who attended the highly gifted N H magnet: they still had to content with the general rough playyard hassles of any other kid, and those were really rough indeed. Maybe there should be more attention to safe, non-bullying zones.
Too bad Brewer, Garcia and the Mayor couldn’t actually be at their presentations (the Mayor showed up at the end to talk to them); they should read their reports and respond.
Good grief, Celeste. A bunch of kids don’t know what they are talking about. They take the standard notes and put them into a report without a really serious study and without a clue as to how to pay for their proposals. This is like some old children’s movie where the kids want to save one thing or another and pull it off–always outsmarting their parents. Such things may make for an entertaining movie for children, but such things in real life are rare.
Now, a new bunch of activists have been born and made to feel important for accomplishing nothing, so I’m sure that we’ll have another generation of people with grand ideas who were never taught how to make a decent living on their own.
Next time, the teacher should send them to a business to find out how things are done in the world of productive people.
Once and for all: GOVERNMENT IS NOT A BUSINESS.
SCHOOLS ARE NOT A BUSINESS
There is or should be no profit motive in providing public services.
But let the kids study business. They might look at Halliburton/KBR’s provision of services in Iraq.
Or compare PG&E with LA’s DWP. to see who is more efficient.
My guess is a “for-Profit” school would have larger class sizes as this would increase “productivity” by teachers.
Finally one other point. GWB is the first MBA President.
I rest my case!
Oh, piffle, Woody.
1. This study was overseen by one of the best respected education researchers in the state.
2. These recommendations are precisely what Green Dot and the more successful charters ARE doing, and still managing to balance their budgets. Why? Because the money is going into the classroom, and teacher salaries, not into administrative costs, and high ticket “learning programs” that are paid for, trained for, then tossed in the ashcan within a year or two in favor of the next hot “program.”
(Yes, Green Dot and others are getting big bucks donations from foundations, but that money is going primarily into school site acquisition and prep, so don’t go there anybody).
3. The one bright spot in the students’ reports was the Miguel Contreras Learning Center (pool issues, not withstanding), which has been coming as close as it can to the above recommendations.
4. It’s a lot cheaper to education kids than to incarcerate ’em. 80 percent of those in California prisons don’t have a high school diploma.
Every single study shows that smaller class sizes are cheaper in the long run when one looks at ALL the costs —meaning especially the collateral costs of NOT educating kids.
In short, if you’re going to do the math on this, please include all the numbers.
rlc, no kidding that government and schools are businesses given the way that they are run. However, they are businesses in the sense that they take tax money and have to show results for how it was used. So, “once and for all,” government and schools are businesses, and nothng that you say will change that.
Celeste, who is that “one of the best respected education researchers in the state?” A few years ago, I got into a discussion about a certain course with the dean of the English department, and she tried to blow me off by saying that her program was consistent with what had been advanced by Stanford University. Big deal, Stanford is pretty left-wing, and this dean was respected in the education field, too. Neither one of those facts swayed me from seeing what was right. Most college professors that I know outside of the business schools are fruitcakes.
I went to a site which I believe is the report card site for IDEA. Yeah, I see a lot of problems with it, but the biggest problem is that anyone, expecially a professor, thinks that the world needs to stop to hear and implement what a bunch of teenagers say is best–whether it is or not. This is as stupid as that kid passing the note to President Bush about the war.
I trust the adults more than a bunch of kids trying pretend that they are important just because some activist professor tells them that they are. Don’t you fall for that.
Woody, I think it’s good to encourage kids to think about these sorts of issues and give their input. Of course, they have no more sense of fiscal responsibility than ric (#3), but they can’t be expected to be yet. My one quibble with this recap and the whole LAT article is, the tone of the kids: Carla Hernandez berating the grownups in attendance with: “You’re sitting here listening to the research, but if you don’t do anything about it, you’re part of the problem,” strikes me as the very sort of rudeness and lack of boundaries that has led to all the other social declines we’re seeing, from how brazenly paparazzi-like the MSM has gotten, to the firing-line nature of talkshows, and the lack of respect kids show their teachers and authority figures.
No way I could have, or should have, talked to my teachers, principals and top city leaders that way at 15.
Kudos to Teh Smart Guys for rolling up their sleeves and getting their research hands ‘dirty.’ I imagine it was a heck of a learning experience – about “city hall.” Their research echoes much of the professional research that’s been done to date and published in peer reviewed journals. Good on ’em.
And, good on ’em for having the courage to say what so many other professionals think, but for reasons of professional relationships rarely say, We’ve done the work, we got you some answers, but truth to tell, you really don’t give a shit, do you? Of course, being the good kids that they are, they didn’t put it that way.
I struggle with survey research, although I don’t doubt its value. The quality of the data is only as good as the honesty with which it’s offered, point one. And, kids sometimes can have a constricted view of their own situation, point two. Still, everything that was offered and reported can be tied back at least indirectly, if not dead-on directly, to statistically significant estimates revealed by quantitative studies.
Thanks for sharing their work. Oh, as for,
Gee, isn’t that special.
Maggie, good point. Lack of respect for authority by youth took off in the late 1960’s, and now those losers are teaching today’s kids to do the same. There is value in teaching the kids to do research, but that value is more than offset with the negative when the kids get “smart” with adults.
I should send Celeste a bumper sticker that I saw, and since she’s a liberal, her car is likely covered with them. The bumper sticker says “Hire a teenager while he still knows everything.”
My happy little Escape Hybrid has no bumper stickers. But that one’s pretty funny.