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    Study: Most Students in South Are Poor
    By Halimah Abdullah
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Monday 29 October 2007

    Washington - For the first time in more than 40 years, the majority of children in public schools in the South are poor, according to a report released Tuesday.

    In 11 Southern states, including Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, a significant increase in the number of poor children attending public school has sent district officials scurrying for solutions on how to best educate kids who are coming from economically disadvantaged homes.

    "The future of the South's ability to have an educated population is going to depend on how well we can improve these students' education," said Steve Suitts, a program coordinator with the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on Southern educational issues and conducted the study.

    In places like Memphis, where roughly 80 percent of students come from low-income homes, that has meant adopting models that address teaching children in poverty. In Miami-Dade, where 61 percent of students are on free or reduced-price lunch, that has meant strengthening efforts to improve all students' math and reading scores and curb dropout rates.

    "The reason this presents a profound challenge for us is that low-income students as a group begin school least ready," Suitts said. "They are the students most likely to drop out of school. They perform at the lowest levels on tests that decide graduation and advancement. They have the least access to college."

    Twenty years ago, Mississippi was the only state in the country with such a high percentage of poor public school students. However, as textile mills shut down in the Carolinas, Appalachian coal mines cut workers and a recession swept the nation, families in the South were especially hard hit, the Southern Education Foundation report found.

    Also hitting the South disproportionately were federal cutbacks in anti-poverty programs, the region's higher rates of underemployment and the increased birthrates of Hispanic and African American children - who are statistically more likely than their white peers to be born into poverty.

    Now, a majority of public school students are considered low income in a total of 13 states, including 11 in the South. The South shows tremendous variability, with 84 percent of students considered low-income in Louisiana, 75 percent in Mississippi, 62 percent in Florida, 49 percent in North Carolina, but only 33 percent in Virginia.

    According to the report, public schools in the West may face similar problems in the next five to seven years. Already 51 percent of public school children in California and 62 percent of those in New Mexico are considered low income.

    All told, the report said, 54 percent of students in Southern states are judged to be poor, a significant increase from the 37 percent so classified in the late 1980s. Nationally, 46 percent of public school students are low-income.

    According to 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores, lower-income fourth and eighth graders lagged 20 to 30 points behind their peers on math and reading tests. Poor, Southern students who make up the majority of their states' student populations also have lower college attendance rates than their peers, the Southern Education Foundation report found.

    Further complicating matters is the fact that, as a region, the South spends less per pupil on education than do other parts of the country.

    In 2000, Mississippi's highest per pupil expenditures were $5,631. Connecticut's lowest per pupil expenditure for the same year was $8,030.

    "The South historically was just a poorer part of the country and didn't have the focus on education that other parts of the country had," said Jeff Kuhner, a spokesman for the Fordham Foundation, an education think tank in Washington. "Part of its strategy for the past 25 to 30 years has been cheap, undereducated labor, they don't have labor unions. But human capital is just as important as investment capital."

    One Southern strategy gaining momentum is strengthening early-childhood education. In at at least 12 Southern states, including Georgia, Kentucky and Mississippi, the number of 4-year-olds enrolled in state pre-K programs or Head Start is greater than the number of 4-year-olds in poverty, according to the Southern Regional Education Board.

    Proponents hope that early childhood education will help all students, regardless of income level, succeed.

 

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    One in Ten Schools Are "Dropout Factories"
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 30 October 2007

    Washington - It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That dubious distinction applies to more than one in 10 high schools across America.

    "If you're born in a neighborhood or town where the only high school is one where graduation is not the norm, how is this living in the land of equal opportunity?" asks Bob Balfanz, the researcher at Johns Hopkins University who defines such a school as a "dropout factory."

    There are about 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide that fit that description, according to an analysis of Education Department data conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press. That's 12 percent of all such schools, no more than a decade ago but no less, either.

    While some of the missing students transferred, most dropped out, Balfanz says. The data tracked senior classes for three years in a row - 2004, 2005 and 2006 - to make sure local events like plant closures weren't to blame for the low retention rates.

    The highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest. Most have high proportions of minority students. These schools are tougher to turn around, because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones - the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services.

    Utah, which has low poverty rates and fewer minorities than most states, is the only state without a dropout factory. Florida and South Carolina have the highest percentages. About half of high schools in those states classify as dropout factories.

    "Part of the problem we've had here is we live in a state that culturally and traditionally has not valued a high school education," said Jim Foster, a spokesman for South Carolina's Department of Education. He noted that South Carolina residents once could get good jobs in textile mills without a high school degree, but that those jobs are now much harder to come by.

    Federal lawmakers haven't focused much attention on the problem. The No Child Left Behind education law, for example, pays much more attention to educating younger students. But that appears to be changing.

    House and Senate proposals to renew the five-year-old No Child law would give high schools more federal money and put more pressure on them to improve, and the Bush administration supports the idea.

    The current law imposes serious consequences on schools that report low scores on math and reading tests, such as having to replace teachers or principals, but it lacks the same kind of teeth when it comes to graduation rates.

    Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma. For Hispanic and black students, the proportion drops to about half.

    The legislative proposals would:

    - Make sure schools report their graduation rates by racial, ethnic and other subgroups and are judged on those. That's to ensure schools aren't just graduating white students in high numbers, but also are working to ensure minority students get diplomas.

    - Get states to build data systems to keep track of students throughout their school years and more accurately measure graduation and dropout rates.

    - Ensure states count graduation rates in a uniform way. States have used a variety of formulas, including counting the percentage of entering seniors who get a diploma. That measurement ignores the fact that kids who drop out typically do so before their senior year.

    - Create strong progress goals for graduation rates and impose sanctions on schools that miss them. Most states currently lack meaningful goals, according to The Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for poor and minority children.

    The current law requires testing in reading and math once in high school, and those tests take on added importance because of serious consequences for a school that fails. Critics say that creates a perverse incentive for schools to encourage kids to drop out before they bring down a school's scores.

    "The vast majority of educators do not want to push out kids, but the pressures to raise test scores above all else are intense," said Bethany Little, vice president for policy at the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group focused on high schools. "To know if a high school is doing its job, we need to consider test scores and graduation rates equally."

    Little said some students pushed out of high schools are encouraged to enroll in programs that prepare them to take the GED exam. People who pass that test get certificates indicating they have high-school level academic skills. But the research shows getting a GED doesn't lead to the kind of job or college success associated with a regular diploma.

    Loretta Singletary, 17, enrolled in a GED program after dropping out of a Washington, D.C., high school that she describes as huge, chaotic and violent. "Girls got jumped, boys got jumped, teachers (were) fighting and hitting students," she said.

    She said teachers had low expectations for students, which led to dull classes. "They were teaching me stuff I already knew ... basic nouns, simple adjectives."

    Singletary said she loved science but wasn't offered it and her complaints to administrators went unanswered. "I was interested in experiments," she said. "I didn't have science in 9th or 10th grade."

    A GED classmate of Singletary's is 23-year-old Dontike Miller, who attended and left two D.C. high schools on the dropout factory list. Miller was brought up by a single mother who used drugs, and he said teachers and counselors seemed oblivious to what was going on in his life.

    He would have liked for someone to sit him down and say: "You really need to go to class. We're going to work with you. We're going to help you," Miller said. Instead, "I had nobody."

    Teachers and administrators at Baltimore Talent Development High School, where 90 percent of kids are on track toward graduating on time, are working hard to make sure students don't have an experience like Miller's.

    The school, which sits in the middle of a high-crime, impoverished neighborhood two miles west of downtown Baltimore, was founded by Balfanz and others four years ago as a laboratory for getting kids out on time with a diploma and ready for college.

    Teachers, students and administrators at the school know each other well.

    "I know teachers that have knocked on people's doors. They want us to succeed," 12th-grader Jasmine Coleman said during a lunchtime chat in the cafeteria.

    Fellow senior Victoria Haynes says she likes the way the school organizes teachers in teams of four, each assigned to a group of 75 students. The teachers work across subject areas; English and math teachers, for example, collaborate on lessons and discuss individual students' needs.

    "They all concentrate on what's best for us together," Haynes said. "It's very family-oriented. We feel really close to them."

    Teachers, too, say it works.

    "I know the students a lot better, because I know the teachers who teach them," said 10th-grade English teacher Jenni Williams. "Everyone's on the same page, so it's not like you're alone in your mission."

    That mission can be daunting. The majority of students who enter Baltimore Talent Development in 9th grade are reading at a 5th or 6th grade level.

    To get caught up, students have 80-minute lessons in reading and math, instead of the typical 45 minutes. They also get additional time with specialists if needed.

    The fact that youths are entering high schools with such poor literacy skills raises questions about how much catch-up work high schools can be expected to do, say some high-school principals.

    "We're at the end of the process," says Mel Riddile, principal of T.C. Williams High School, a large public school in Alexandria, Va., which is not on the dropout factory list. "People don't walk into 9th grade and suddenly have a reading problem."