Dealing With the Dropout Problem

When I worked as an English teacher in a Westchester high school in the seventies, nearly all the students graduated, and most went on to earn degrees in college. Today, my daughter, Brenda, teaches in a similar school district, and the same situation prevails. These students’ parents are mostly well-educated and successful. Stories and reading are part of the child’s life from an early age. Many will have some experience of cultural events at home and abroad as they grow up. Their friends are likely to come from similarly ambitious and successful families. Educators talk about a positive family and community as the infrastructure that breeds educational success, and these kids are blessed to grow up in such an enhancing environment.

Most of my professional life I worked in inner-city high schools. In Dublin, I was employed for ten years as a guidance counselor and teacher in Ballymun, which was a very poor area in the north of the city. The huge tower blocks were mostly used as a dumping ground for all the problem families of the city. The movie The Committments was filmed in Ballymun and gave a fair picture of the chaotic life there for young people. For the last twenty years, I was employed as a guidance counselor in a high school in the South Bronx. The students mostly came from the surrounding apartment blocks. Many were recent immigrants whose first language was Spanish.

The Ballymun and South Bronx communities had much in common. In both cases the people were poor and felt marginalized. In the South Bronx, most of the kids came from one-parent families; while this was somewhat less of a problem in Dublin, it was still a common feature of family life there too. Poverty was a dominant factor in both communities. Many mothers worked in low-paying jobs, with little or no male support, barely paying the bills. Fast food from local take-aways often provided the staple diet. Drug and alcohol abuse heightened the misery in many families on both sides of the Atlantic. In a word, the infrastructure for success in school was lacking in both places.

The correlation between socio-economic status and educational achievement is well established. The existence of a large minority of unschooled, almost illiterate, children and adults provides a huge challenge in all Western countries. These are often alienated people, unemployed or working in poor-paying jobs, who draw heavily on the social welfare system. They are also far more likely than their middle-class counterparts to be in trouble with the law, and statistics show that the vast majority of people in jail do not have a high school diploma.

It is a major challenge for political leaders to devise policies that would diminish this problem. The record so far is very discouraging because policy makers are trying to remedy not one problem, but a whole complex of issues. The school dropout programs that I have participated in or read about have a low success rate. With the best of intentions, the teachers and counselors who run these after-school or weekend programs find themselves swimming against a strong tide of failure and indifference. There are some success stories, but, unfortunately, the dynamics that created the problem do not subside after school.

There is certainly no one solution to the complex dropout problem. The following three proposals are not novel, but taken together, I believe that they would be helpful in reducing the level of school failure.

Early Childhood Education: Studies of early education programs are very encouraging. A major review of a program in Chicago, carried out over a long period of time, showed that children, who had the benefit of ECE did much better in later education and employment than a comparable group of deprived students who did not have the benefit of ECE. The thinking behind these programs makes eminent sense: replace some of the negative home influences for three-year olds with a positive and supportive school environment and you can expect good results. President-elect Obama, who surely knows plenty about this issue from his years as a community worker in Chicago, has promised a national pre-school program during his first term as president.

Class Size: The number of students that a teacher faces in the classroom makes a big difference to the learning process. To give individual attention, a teacher should not have to deal with more than about twenty pupils at a time. It is really ironic that the size of classes in inner-city schools in New York is significantly higher than in middle-class school districts in the suburbs. This is an issue of funding and it reflects the priorities that are driving political decisions, so this situation can be addressed and remedied in Albany and City Hall.

Quality of Teaching: How do we encourage the best and the brightest teachers to work in the most challenging schools? Salary is an issue, and it is not helpful that many good teachers are enticed away from New York City to jobs in the suburbs that pay as much as 20% more. However, monetary compensation is not the main inducement for teachers, and, certainly, the idea of merit pay, where one teacher in a school earns more than a colleague, would be disastrous for school morale and should not be considered for that reason. Teachers will stay in a school where they are respected and dealt with fairly. Many school administrators seem far more worried about their own image than promoting a teacher-friendly environment. The ability of administrators to collaborate with teachers should be a primary consideration in selecting school leaders.