This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Terry Stoops, Education Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation.
Last week, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction released dropout data for the 2006–2007 school year, and the news was not good. The 5.24 percent dropout rate marked a 4 percent increase from the year before. It was the highest rate in seven years. Nearly 1,400 more students dropped out last year than the year before, bringing the total number of North Carolina’s dropouts to a staggering 23,550 students.
Members of the State Board of Education responded to the bad news, rather ironically, by praising the state’s ongoing efforts to keep kids in school, as well as acknowledging new initiatives like the dropout prevention grant program. In 2007, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly encouraged school systems and organizations to compete for $7 million in grants they set aside to support “innovative programs and initiatives that target students at risk of dropping out of school.”
More than 300 groups applied for the one-time grants, which ranged in size from $25,000 to $150,000. An independent committee selected 60 groups to receive grants based on the strength of their grant proposals and the location of the schools served, rather than need and practicality. Take the following examples:
• Polk County Schools received a $100,000 grant despite having one of the highest graduation rates and one of the lowest dropout rates in the state, 82.0 percent and 3.45 percent, respectively.
• Athens Drive High School in Wake County had an 82.7 percent graduation rate, which exceeded the state and district average, and had fewer dropouts than eight other Wake County high schools. The school received nearly $40,000 in grant money.
• Ninth-grade students at the John T. Hoggard High School in New Hanover County will read “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens,” among other program activities related to their $105,000 grant. Hoggard High School has the highest graduation rate of any grant recipient, 86.7 percent, and the fewest dropouts of any high school in New Hanover County.
• The $54,000 dropout prevention program at South Stokes High School will accommodate 675 students; the district had only 39 dropouts last year. Similarly, the selection committee awarded Hertford County Public Schools a $97,000 grant for a 150-student program despite having only 35 dropouts in 2006–2007.
• Edenton-Chowan schools will receive $150,000 to hire a full-time Life Coach Coordinator and three part-time Life Coaches to serve 60 families. According to a 2002 article in the Journal of Staff Development, “Life coaching assists people in discovering what they want in life by helping them clarify personal and professional goals and create multiple paths to achieve those goals.” It should come as no surprise that no empirical research studies show that life coaching is a legitimate dropout prevention strategy.
• North Carolina A&T State University will receive $150,000 to teach stepping in Guilford County schools. A recent article published in the Journal of Curriculum Studies defined stepping as “a branch of the African-American vernacular dance tree” that helps teachers “become concerned about their positionality as members of the dominant group (if indeed they are).” Researchers have yet to assess the relationship between dropouts and stepping or, for that matter, the Electric Slide, Achy Breaky Heart, Macarena, Soulja Boy, etc.
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will use its $126,651 grant to train 15 teachers how to improve relationships and instructional strategies for “boys with color” in Pre-K through third grade. This means that results from the program – the dropout status of students – will not be available for at least eight years and will likely fade out by the time those children reach middle school (or the next grade).
Even though most members of the General Assembly initially supported funding for the dropout grants, a number of legislators, both Democratic and Republican, have begun to doubt that the funded programs will substantially lower the dropout rate. At a recent meeting of the Joint Legislative Commission on Dropout Prevention and High School Graduation, Rep. Dan Blue pointed out:
[The grant programs] replicate what they [school systems] already are doing or what they should be doing, in most instances. There are tremendous dollars spent in dropout prevention, and when you look at the results in certain sectors of the student population, one would ask, again playing devil’s advocate, whether just not spending anything in dropout prevention would yield the same results; some of the numbers are so disconcerting.
Regardless, Bill Farmer, a Time Warner Cable executive and dropout committee co-chair, suggested that legislators provide additional funds for the dropout prevention programs that his committee rejected. Yet, before legislators waste more taxpayer money on unproven dropout prevention programs, they should take the simple, yet overlooked, step of determining why students in North Carolina drop out in the first place.