Sunday, June 17, 2007
Editorial: Kids don't drop out all of the sudden
Getting kids to school is bound to help keep kids in school.
From the RoundTable blog
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If they haven't already, Roanoke School Board members might want to pick up a copy of our June 13 edition, skip to the Virginia section front and carefully read the story about graduation rates. Any way it is measured, Roanoke's rate is horrendous.
After digesting that information, school board members might want to skip to the bottom of the same page and read how Lucy Addison Middle School gave away 16 new bikes as a way to encourage students to perform better on the Standards of Learning exams.
The feel-good story was interrupted by this information: Students could earn a chance of winning the bike if they missed fewer than three days in the fourth quarter. That's one quarter -- 45 days -- not even an entire school year. Seems like such a low expectation, but at Addison it was huge.
See a problem here? As Addison's principal Robert Johnson said, "Attendance is everything; teachers cannot prepare you if you aren't in the building."
The incentive worked. "Our attendance went up like crazy," he said.
Want to figure out why fewer than 60 percent of Roanoke's ninth-graders stick out the four years until graduation? One reason could be attendance habits.
If they're missing lots of days in elementary and middle schools, they aren't keeping up with the work. And if they aren't keeping up, they're falling behind. Soon they fail, think of themselves as failures and give up as soon as they can.
Roanoke's school board has an opportunity anew to address its troubled schools with the addition of new members with fresh ideas and with the pending selection of a new superintendent. This should allow for a vigorous discussion on the correlation between attendance and performance and of ways to boost the former to impact the latter.
Addison's reward system proves that dangling carrots does work by giving students an incentive to learn beyond the satisfaction of earning good grades.
But so too must schools, starting in the primary grades, use sticks to compel attendance. This means diligently tracking down absentees, talking with the parents, hounding them and, if necessary, taking enforcement action.
If Roanoke can get kids coming to school, it stands a better chance of keeping them in school.
