PA Dropout Summit

State, Community Leaders Unite to Tackle Pennsylvania's High School Dropout Problem

Secretaries of Education, Labor & Industry Discuss Multi-faceted Approaches

HARRISBURG, Pa., Nov. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New strategies to keep students engaged in school and on track to earning a high school diploma were discussed today at a summit, hosted by the Rendell administration and community partners.

"It is our obligation as educators to ensure that all students finish high school with a diploma in hand," Education Secretary Gerald L. Zahorchak said. "A meaningful diploma is truly a ticket to success that helps our students become productive citizens."

Local elected officials, business leaders and prominent child advocacy organizations gathered at the Pennsylvania's Dropout Prevention and Re-Engagement Summit to develop an action plan for increasing the state's high school graduation rate in order to ensure that Pennsylvania's young people are better prepared for college, work and life.

A report, commissioned by America's Promise Alliance, the nation's largest alliance of organizations working on behalf of children and youth, found that only about half of all students served by the school systems in the nation's 50 largest cities graduate from high school. In Pennsylvania, approximately one-in-five (21 percent) 9th grade students do not graduate four years later. Nationwide, nearly one out of every three public high school students drops out before graduation. That's 1.2 million students each year, or nearly 7,000 each school day.

Pennsylvania's comprehensive approach to curbing dropouts has three main components: prevention, intervention and re-engagement.

Prevention efforts are aimed at helping at-risk children get off to a solid start through programs such as Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts, state funding for Head Start and block grant funding for full-day kindergarten. The Department of Education also works closely with the Department of Public Welfare to administer early intervention programs to aid children with particular educational or developmental needs.

Intervention and re-engagement programs include tutoring, alternative education programs and a host of efforts to make high school more challenging and engaging for students.

These efforts include:

-- Classrooms for the Future, a three-year investment to provide laptop
computers, high-speed Internet access and state-of-the-art software to
high school classrooms across the state.
-- A Dual Enrollment program that allows high school students to take
college-level, credit-bearing courses at local community and four-year
colleges and universities while earning credit towards high school
graduation.
-- Project 720, named for the number of days a Pennsylvania student spends
in school from 9th through 12th grades. Project 720 ensures high school
students have access to rigorous academic coursework in core subjects,
provides additional Advanced Placement courses and offers smaller
learning environments for better student-teacher interaction.
-- A Resiliency/Wellness Approach, which is based upon six key
environmental protective factors or positive human development domains.
If these domains are strongly and well implemented in schools, they will
promote positive social and emotional development, and will support
student academic achievement.

All of these efforts are aimed at creating a more rigorous and relevant high school environment that keeps students engaged.

The summit is part of America's Promise Dropout Prevention Campaign, a national effort to reduce high school dropout rates and prepare children for college, work and life. The campaign includes a series of Dropout Prevention Summits that will be held in every state and 50 communities over the next two years.

The lead sponsor for the national campaign is the State Farm Insurance Company. State Farm is joined by AT&T, The Boeing Company, Casey Family Programs, Ford Motor Company Fund, ING Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation. For more information or to learn how to get involved, visit www.americaspromise.org.

Pennsylvania's summit is co-sponsored by the departments of Education, Labor & Industry, Health, and Public Welfare; the Governor's Commission for Children and Families; the Institute for Global Education & Service Learning; PennSERVE; Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children; Pennsylvania Statewide/Afterschool Youth Development Network; the Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Board; the Philadelphia Youth Network; Summit Health and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

For more information on Pennsylvania's summit, visit

www.center-school.org/americas_promise.php.

Schools News Around the Blogosphere

Pride in public schools fuels positive involvement
Boston Globe
According to her job description, West Roxbury's Kathleen Colby is the YMCA's liaison to the classrooms of this city, charged with assuring parents that Boston public schools offer "good and valid options" for their children.

Many Mass. graduates unprepared in college
Boston Globe
Thousands of Massachusetts public high school graduates arrive at college unprepared for even the most basic math and English classes, forcing them to take remedial courses that discourage many from staying in school, according to a statewide study released yesterday.

At a McLean Elementary School, Tag Is Banned
Washington Post
In a letter to parents, principal calls activity a game "of intense aggression," touching off debate among those who call ban an example of overzealous rules and others who say caution is best.

Math report recommends teachers focus on basic skills
Salt Lake Tribune
Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune
In a small room deep within the Salt Palace Convention Center, about 70 teachers from across the nation spent Friday morning learning how to better teach fractions.

Fla. Schools Fear Gains May Vanish
The Ledger
With budget cuts upcoming, educators are afraid national ranking may drop. TALLAHASSEE | Just as Florida's public school system - long ranked among the worst in the nation - has begun to show marked improvement, a series of state budget cuts threatens to derail that progress, particularly for students and schools already struggling to keep pace. The lack of an income tax meant less money for schools. And the large retired population seemed uncommitted to funding schools.

Students deficient at being proficient
San Diego Union-Trubune
Cal State schools are a long way from their goal of seeing 90 percent of entering freshmen ready for college-level work. Instead, 37 percent of freshmen entered a California State University campus last fall needing remedial math, while 46 percent were unprepared for college-level English, according to new data.

Special-ed costs taxing town budgets
Boston Globe
Special-education costs are due to rise by $1 million or more in some local school districts next year, further straining budgets at a time when many face a gloomy financial outlook.

No Reform Left Behind
Washington Post
The Education Department lets states try more flexible ways to meet 'No Child' requirements. FEDERAL education officials are holding out a promise of flexibility to states that have chafed under the "one size fits all" aspects of the No Child Left Behind law. There's no question that individual schools need different strategies. States should be encouraged to innovate.

Bond...James Bond

When I read this, all I could think about was the craven small minded people from Morrisville who have nothing better to do than to sit like latter day trolls at the foot of the Delaware bridges and watch license plates, waiting, watching, hoping, to find an *GASP* outsider being schooled inside the Morrisville School District.

Don't get me wrong. Following up on reports of non-district students attending here, especially when we're in the financial straits we are, is reasonable and required. I'm looking at the wannabe Mrs. Kravitz who devotes time to a rather fruitless pursuit where the return on the time invested is minimal to zero. The time would be better spent volunteering INSIDE a classroom, where the return is timeless and priceless. What a great MasterCard commercial this could make.

The story is from the UK, but could have been headlined from just about any US city.

Poole council spies on family over school claim

A council has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.

For two weeks the middle-class family was followed by council officials who wanted to establish whether they had given a false address within the catchment area of an oversubscribed school to secure a place for their three-year-old.

Notes on the movements of the mother and her three children
The council logged the family's actions in detail- click to enlarge

The "spies" made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, who they referred to as "targets" as they were trailed on school runs. The snoopers even watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping.

In fact, the 39-year-old mother - who described the snooping as "a grotesque invasion of privacy" - had held lengthy discussions with the council, which assured her that her school application was totally in order.

Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family.

This has led to fears that parents all over the country could be monitored by councils cracking down on those who bend the rules to get their children into a good school.

The Act was pushed through by the Government in 2000 to allow police and other security agencies to carry out surveillance on serious organised crime and terrorists. It has since been taken up by councils to catch those carrying out any "criminal activity".

The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: "I'm incensed that legislation designed to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old. It was very creepy when we found out that people had been watching us and making notes.
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"Councils should be protecting children, not spying on them."

The surveillance began when the mother, who runs an online toy business, and her 36-year-old partner, a computer programmer, applied for their youngest child to go to Lilliput First School, where their two elder children, aged six and 10, were educated.

The primary school, near the millionaire suburb of Sandbanks, Dorset, is heavily oversubscribed.

At the time they were in the middle of moving house but, after consulting the school, they held off selling because that may have meant moving just outside its catchment area.

When the deadline passed for them to get into the school, which the girl joins in September, they moved a mile down the road and put the house back on the market. Then the council began its investigation. "We have lived in the house for 10 years, our eldest went to the school and our middle child is still at the school and so it seemed only right to send our youngest, especially as all her friends were going there," said the mother.

"We checked with the school and everything was above board and then we were called in and told we had been under surveillance. I could not believe my ears. Not only is it an invasion of our privacy but what a waste of money, especially as we had done nothing wrong."

Yesterday the council defended using the powers, claiming that lying on a school application amounted to fraud. It said it had used the law on two other occasions during the past year and on both had proved that parents had lied about where they lived.

However, James Welch, of the human rights pressure group Liberty, said: "It's one thing for anti-terror police to use covert surveillance, but it has come to a pretty pass when it becomes the tool of the school catchment area police. This is a disproportionate and unnecessarily intrusive use of RIPA."

It STILL Ain't Just Us!

The results are in and it seems that students nationally are failing to be proficient. I'm not sure that my math skills are good enough to count up all of the children being left behind.

Let's be sure to note that all our students nationally should be doing better, but it's pretty clear that Dr. Yonson and her cabinet are doing the job here in Morrisville.

U.S. Students Achieve Mixed Results on Writing Test
New York Times
By SAM DILLON

About a third of the nation's eighth-grade students, and roughly a quarter of its high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to nationwide test results.

That proportion of students demonstrating writing proficiency is about the same as in 2002, when a similar exam was last given.

But the results of the latest test, administered last year, also found modest increases in the skills of lower-performing students. Nearly 9 students in 10 can now demonstrate at least a basic achievement in writing, defined as partial mastery of the skills needed for proficient work.

As in the past, girls outperformed boys by far, most decisively at the eighth-grade level, where 41 percent of them achieved proficiency, compared with 20 percent of boys. The racial achievement gap narrowed slightly, with black and Hispanic students’ writing improving a bit more than did whites’.

The results for eighth graders, though not for seniors, were broken down by states, the top performers of which were New Jersey, where 56 percent of students scored at or above proficiency levels, and Connecticut, where the number was 53 percent. Nineteen states ranked above New York, where it was 31 percent.

That a third of the nation’s eighth graders can write with proficiency may not sound like much, but it is the best performance by eighth-grade students in any subject tested in the national assessment in the last three years. Only 17 percent of eighth graders were proficient on the 2006 history exam, for example.

Though some experts questioned whether the writing test, which requires students to compose only brief essays in a short time, was an accurate measure of their ability, officials of the government’s testing program said they were encouraged by the results.

“I am happy to report, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that the death of writing has been greatly exaggerated,” said Amanda P. Avallone, an eighth-grade English teacher who is vice chairwoman of the board that oversees the testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card.”

The results were released at the Library of Congress in Washington. The host, James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about “the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought — the sentence,” as young Americans do most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.

“The sentence is the biggest casualty,” Mr. Billington said. “To what extent is students’ writing getting clearer?”

Ms. Avallone sought to allay his concern.

“I know that the sentence has not been put to rest as a unit of communication,” she said.

Ms. Avallone also said the difference in scores between girls and boys might result in part from lower literacy expectations for boys in the public schools.

“These days I seldom if ever hear the message that math and science do not matter for girls,” she said, “yet I do still encounter the myth that many boys won’t really need to write very much or very well once they leave school.”

The national writing test was given to 140,000 eighth graders and 28,000 12th graders selected to form a representative sample of all students nationwide in the two grades. Each student wrote two 25-minute essays intended to measure skills at writing to inform, persuade and tell stories.

Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficiency level, which the test designers defined as competency in carrying out challenging academic tasks. Eighty-eight percent scored at or above the basic level, up from 85 percent in 2002.

“These results pleased and encouraged me,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s 60 largest urban districts. “A lot of cities have introduced explicit writing programs. You go into urban schools and you see hallways lined with samples of student writing. Writing programs have gotten better.”

If Mr. Casserly was encouraged, some others were not, particularly in light of other indicators of Americans’ writing prowess. A survey of 120 corporations conducted by the College Board in 2003, for instance, concluded that a third of employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies, including many recent college graduates, wrote poorly.

“American students’ writing skills are deteriorating,” said Will Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, a journal that features history research papers written by high school students.

Mr. Fitzhugh expressed skepticism that the national assessment accurately measured students’ overall writing skills, because, he said, it tested only their ability to write brief essays jotted out in half an hour.

“The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college,” he said, “is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it. And nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly.”

Miscellaneous Items

First off, kudos to phillyburbs.com and their new homepage.




Let's also remember that the PSSA testing is taking place over the next few days.

There's five districts that exceeded the 4.4% cap. Morrisville, as we know, is not one of them.

The Bucks County Technical School budget is out. Fulminations from the Stop the Schoolers to follow!

Complete breakdown of communication causes major issue with school construction! Correction: Oopsie corrected with media coverage attached. Check out the reader comments to complete the hilarity.

Education Articles of Note

The CSI crew won't be adding any new techs from the Las Vegas/Clark County Schools System anytime soon.
91% + 87% + 88% = FAILED

But...do we need to know this anyway?
What is the Rationale for Requiring Higher Mathematics Proficiency for All K-12 Students?

And why did we do so poorly?
It’s not easy to understand why students perform dismally on high school standard math tests

Starting over from scratch is easier than rebuilding and restoring?
Vallas: New Orleans is a breeze