News and Research...

• April 4, 2013: Witness for Justice column, Safe Schools.
  
• April 3, 2013: Schools in Oakland, California support students with restorative justice program and eliminate zero tolerance.
  
• March 12, 2013: Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director/Council of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, writes to oppose increasing the number of School Resource Officers, another name for armed police, in public schools because the presence of police increasingly criminalizes students.
  
• January 2013: In the context of the horrific shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, the UCC Justice & Witness Ministries has signed on with many of our partners to this excellent statement: Police in Schools Are Not the Answer to the Newtown Shooting. The statement urges school districts to improve support for students with more counselors, social workers, and psychologists. The statement objects to increasing police presence in school and objects to a locked-down climate that makes children feel less safe.
• January 2013: Here is a short, pithy policy brief from the National Education Policy Center that summarizes what should be done for Dropout Prevention.
  
• December 2012: The Opportunity to Learn Campaign has just published Stopping Out-of-School Suspensions: A Guide for State Policy, to help advocates  press for state legislative policy to stop out-of-school suspensions and press for school discipline policies that keep kids in school.  The toolkit includes questions to guide state policy makers find what they need to know and describes model laws passed by states to stop suspensions and promote alternatives.

UCC Resources...

Both articles in the 2009 Message on Public Education explore causes of dropping out of school.

Witness for Justice columns explore high school graduation rates.

Plummeting High School Graduation Rates, September 15, 2008 Witness for Justice
Dropouts: Children Left Far Behind, February 20, 2006 Witness for Justice

Background...

Children need to know they are valued. They need to feel important and to have activities that make them feel challenged and excited about learning. They need to have the opportunity to work with adults who care about them. Finally they need to feel they are connected in a real way to a bright future.

The reasons children and adolescents fall behind in school are many.  First there are outside-the-school issues—poverty; lack of access to health and mental health care; lack of access to enriched early education; a culture that glorifies materialism; racial and economic disparities in the systems that serve youths; family mobility; lack of transportation to enriching activities. The list goes on and on. Then there are issues like uneven school funding that reflect society's failure to invest publicly in our nation's poorest children, and a federal education law that punishes rather than builds capacity in the schools that serve America's poorest children. Finally there are the lessons children learn at school that are never spoken—the hidden curriculum that reflects attitudes about authority, attitudes about ways of learning and knowing, and attitudes that identify some students or cultures as more or less desirable. Children internalize the messages their schools convey. Achievement gaps and dropout rates across America—at the most basic level—reflect whose children America is most willing to throw away, for public schools are primary civic institutions that are likely to embody the same biases as the culture of which they are a part.

Even though achievement gaps and graduation gaps are complex and multivariable and must therefore be addressed from many angles, in the church we can educate ourselves about their many causes and we can take steps to support equitable and ample public investment and to reduce bias and racism. As people of faith we can find ways to demonstrate that we care collectively for our children, through all kinds of partnering and mentoring and through being advocates for legislation that supports public schools and helps create a nurturing developmental environment as well as excellence in the curriculum.

A New Way to Measure the Dropout Rate...

The reports above measure dropouts by comparing the number of students entering ninth grade to the number who graduate four years later.  Traditionally, school districts have been able to report numbers without actually determining whether a child moved or was ill, or whether an adolescent has given birth?or has entered juvenile detention.  Historically we have merely trusted the data provided by the schools when children disappear. Until two large studies were conducted in 2004, it had been assumed that most American adolescents were graduating on time. Then Chris Swanson at the Urban Institute and Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters at Johns Hopkins University released studies that compared the number of students entering ninth grade to the number graduating four years later. With slightly different methodologies, these social scientists identified a factor they called "promoting power," the ratio of freshmen to graduates four years later.  In April, 2008, the America's Promise Alliance launched an initiative to expose America's dropout crisis, using the same indicator. In fact the America's Promise research was conducted again by Chris Swanson. 

Description of the Graduation Rate Crisis...

Research demonstrates that large-city schools that serve poor and primarily children of color are failing in many cases to graduate even 50 percent of the adolescents who enter their doors four years earlier. In virtually every case the schools with the worst records are in America's poorest and most segregated core cities. Examples from the 2008 Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytic Report on High School Graduation, from the America's Promise Alliance, are graduation rates in:

Detroit          24.9 percent
Indianapolis   30.5 percent
Cleveland      34.1 percent
Baltimore      34.6 percent
Columbus      40.9 percent
Minneapolis   43.7 percent
Dallas           44.4 percent
New York       45.2 percent
Los Angeles   45.3 percent
Oakland        45.6 percent