High-Poverty, High-Achieving Schools

Education. I rarely write about it, because it's not my area, and I feel like I'm pontificating. (More than usual!) Disclaimer aside, a couple interesting articles in my inbox today:

"Kids Reap Benefits of Longer School Year" and "US high school graduation rate climbs to 69.2 percent." Both headlines rely pretty heavily on spin, but the point they make is that some low-income, urban schools and their students are seeing improved school performance, evidenced by graduation rates, grades, test scores, etc. Credit is given to a longer academic year, early childhood intervention, and alternative paths to graduation. Let's take a look.

The main point about the longer school year is that the only thing that matters is what you do with those additional hours. (Thank you, Captain Obvious!) Downsides include stigma, and fatigue for students and educators, including because kids may be losing sleep due to earlier hours. But the upsides are the enhanced in loco parentis function of the schools for kids for working parents, and all the additional hours spent on homework assistance, reading education, test prep, college prep, etc.

What I find more interesting is that this degree of experimentation is mostly happening - unsurprisingly, perhaps - in charter schools. How much does our public education system respond to the successes gleaned from charter or private schools? How easily are we able to incorporate these changes in public ed? How many low-income kids are served by charter or private schools?

Finally, a bit of a downer in the second article on graduation rates, which talks about all the different strategies schools use to get kids focused on life after high school:

That level of confidence in students isn't universal, however. In a new study by Civic Enterprises, "significant majorities of both the teachers (75 percent) and principals (66 percent) didn't believe students at risk of dropping out would work harder if more were demanded of them," Mr. Bridgeland says. By contrast, the group's landmark 2006 report on dropouts' own views found that 66 percent said they would have worked harder if expectations were raised.

Perhaps these educators need to take a cue from our First Lady.

(Photo of Olympic wrestler [1964] Bob Pickens visiting St. William Elementary School in Chicago during Olympic Week on Art & Culture Day, from the Chicago 2016 photostream)