Our country is facing a host of challenges, but if we care to solve any of them, every single student needs to graduate from high school. No exceptions. No almosts or good-enoughs. No excuses.
Every young person must be prepared to contribute, to succeed and to thrive. Ethnicity, color, economic background, learning difference, special needs…none should be excepted or written off as an acceptable loss.
We will suffer gravely if we can’t graduate every student within the next decade. I don’t mean that only the students will suffer. The nation will suffer and our potential for growth will grind to a halt. We might already be there.
What is sad to me, a retired superintendent, is that we know how to fix this problem. It’s not too late to change course, but do we have the will to do what it takes to make sure every student graduates from high school?
Students need programs reflecting their needs, not their failures
In most states, districts must offer an alternative setting for students who have been suspended or expelled. What typically happens is the students get sent to an unused, dusty classroom to sit idly through their day.
They’ve been discarded and they know it. Their sentence is to serve purgatory, which they repeat over and over until one day, they disappear.
These are the students who need our help and we can’t do that by forcing them to serve time. They need a structure and support that helps them climb out of the hole they’re in. They need programs specifically designed for them, recognizing their unique needs as needs, not failures.
Don’t push the repeat offenders out
Sometimes, when a troublemaking student turns 16, an administrator—who is as fed up with the system as the student—goes to them and says, “You’re 16 now. You don’t need to keep coming to school.”
It’s not always, but it is often enough that everyone has seen it happen and if they haven’t seen it, they’ve quietly felt it. I get it. It is an attitude thing. I’ve seen it right before my eyes.
I’ve also seen hundreds of these kids turn it around. Some have been trying to make it through school, but life has been too difficult. A parent has been sick. They are adjusting to teen parenthood. They have a learning difference. They are homeless.
Several years ago, we asked 2,000 former dropouts who had re-engaged in school why they dropped out in the first place. Almost to a person, they said, “Don’t call us dropouts. We were pushed out of the system. The system didn’t work for us.”
Imagine being 16 and feeling like school doesn’t want you. The one place that was supposed to be safe and where adults said you could find opportunity was a place for everyone else, just not you. It’s our system that isn’t working. Not them.
School should respect and fit their needs, not ours
Schools need adult solutions for students facing adult problems. Our academies that recover students from 16 to 21 are open extended hours every day so that students can do what they need to to put food on the table and get to school in the few hours between jobs and child or parent care.
And, if the job just can’t fit that schedule, we help them find another job. We have to advocate for students in ways that address their primary and basic needs first.
By the way, the traditional academic calendar doesn’t work for these kids, so change it. We tried—once—to take a winter break, but when we came back after the holidays, the students didn’t. The bees had left the hive. There were too many distractions, too many pressing needs. The likelihood they would re-engage plummeted.
We never took a break again. It’s hard to manage around a year-round schedule, but it is absolutely essential.
Squelch the naysayers. They are wrong
The naysayers claim that there aren’t enough people or dollars to make these programs work. They are wrong. Students up to age 21 are still counted and in many states funding can be found. Money can always be found for programs that are essential to life.
Critics say there aren’t enough people to do this kind of work. They aren’t paying attention. There are tens of thousands of people who want to do this work, especially those who were almost statistics themselves. I see them every day and working with them is the second most gratifying aspect of my career.
Here’s what I tell everyone who feels that 90% graduation rate is good enough. If you had 10 kids, would you feel that if nine of them become upstanding contributing citizens, that would be good enough?
I didn’t think so. You’d fight for every one of them. To that, I add that the most gratifying moment in life is shaking the hand of a young person walking across the graduation stage who, one or two years before, hadn’t been seen in a classroom for years.
