Good news on the graduation front. If you haven’t heard, a recent report by Civic Enterprises, Everyone Graduates Center at John Hopkins University, America’s Promise, and the Alliance for Excellent Education found that 580,000 fewer students nationwide attended so-called ‘dropout factories’—those schools that graduate less than 4 in 10 students who enter as 9th graders— in 2009 than a decade ago. This is direct result of that fact that there were 6.4 percent fewer ‘dropout factories’ in 2009 compared to 2008. Even better news is that this rate was three times larger than the rate of reduction between 2007 and 2008.
However, this is just the start to reach the organizations’ goal of increasing the national on-time graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020; currently they estimate the on-time graduation rate at 75 percent. Keep in mind, however, this doesn’t include the approximately 5 percent of students who graduate late (that is, in more than four years) but still earn a standard high school diploma, since late graduates are not yet counted as graduates. Increasing the graduation rate to 90 percent would once again put the U.S. among the world leaders in high school graduates.
But what will it take to meet such a lofty goal? Turning around these ‘dropout factories’ would make a significant progress toward achieving that goal. However, research is not clear on what it takes to turn around such low performing schools.
Yet, recently Patte and I attended a roundtable on the Equitable Access to Effective Teaching put together by the Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at Berkeley Law where we heard about research on the impact principals have on turning around low-performing schools. One panelist pointed out that there are more medical doctors in the U.S. than principals, so it would be realistic to make principal preparation programs nearly as selective as medical schools. We could then have our schools led by our best and brightest who are trained specifically on how to turn around low-performing schools.
We also heard about research that indicates how much principals impact the effectiveness of teachers. In recruiting and retaining effective teachers, as well as providing their teachers with the support and working conditions they need, principals need to be as effective as they possibly could be.
And there are principal preparation programs that are turning out these effective principals, such as the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Urban Education Leadership Program and New Leaders for New Schools. So this is a practical solution that is being done; it just has to be brought to scale nationwide.
I have long believed that principals are the key to improving schools. Whenever I speak to teachers they almost always talk about their principal (either in glowing terms or not-so-glowing terms). Furthermore, for the years I have been identifying high-performing schools, in almost every case where the performance of the school dropped off, I would find out that the principal had left the school. However, I never had data to back up my assumptions about the importance of effective principals until now. More and more research is coming out about the effectiveness of principals such as the great research done by CALDER.
So what we know now is that if can get our best, brightest, and best trained principals into these “dropout factories,” there is a very real chance we can hit that goal of a 90 percent national graduation rate. – Jim Hull
