Reaching Out to Drop Outs
Posted by Chris Bell on September 22, 2006 - 8:26am.
This week the focus of my campaign has been fixing our schools. If we're going to get serious about revolutionizing our state's education system for the 21st century we must face up to what has become a massive social problem in Texas: We are losing 4 of our every 10 kids because of our drop-out crisis. And it's only getting worse.
This is not the Texas in our hearts, and while Rick Perry would rather hide the problem, we have a moral obligation to keep our kids in school for the sake of their future--and for the future of our state.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit a juvenile boot camp in Cameron County. Under the leadership of County Judge Gilberto Hinojosa, the county built the camp as a last-ditch effort to get youth offenders back on track and back in school. The camp has produced some truly remarkable success stories.
In the months since then, I've traveled all across Texas, and it's clear that the dropout crisis is impacting every community in our state. At a time when nearly 40 percent of our high school freshmen don't go on to graduate, Texas desperately needs bold leadership and new vision. Texas is too great to settle for isolated success stories. We need real action to address the dropout crisis, and Rick Perry just hasn't been up to the task.
When it comes to dropouts, Rick Perry can't even admit that we have a problem.
According to the official state report, official dropout rate for the class of 2005 was 4.5 percent. But when a non-partisan, independent research group looked at the numbers, they found a four-year attrition rate of fully 36 percent. Almost four in 10 freshmen who started high school in 2001 left school before graduating in the 2004-2005 school year, and yet Rick Perry talks with a straight face about a dropout rate below 5 percent.
Enough already.
I love Texas too much to turn a blind eye to the dropout crisis. You're either serious about leaving no child behind, or you're just trying to hide your failures in phony reporting. Rick Perry can stick his head in the sand and kick kids out of school, but we'll lose a lot more than money in the long run.
Now, Rick Perry wants to further raise the stakes for the taks test even when education researchers are saying that TAKS is actually fuelling the dropout crisis.
I'd like to relate something that one of my education advisors, Dr. Linda McNeil of Rice University, published in a recent book about high-stakes testing. She wrote, "The high number of dropouts under this system is not unintended consequences or accidental side effects of the system. They are the result of the system when it is working as it is intended. In fact, the system worksthat is, only produces rising scores on the state's standardized testswhen these losses occur."
Linda's right. So are the hundreds of thousands of Texas teachers and parents who know the truth that Rick Perry wants to ignore: High stakes testing has gutted the curriculum in Texas public schools, and it's helping to fuel the dropout crisis in our state.
Minority students are hit the hardest by the tyranny of the TAKS test. Under Rick Perry's administration, the dropout rate for African American students is twice the rate for white students, and the dropout rate among Hispanic students is three times higher than whites.
State researchers have calculated that the dropout crisis will cost Texas 114 billion dollars in economic output over the next 10 years.
We ought to be giving our children ladders to reach for and achieve greatness, but instead we've built a school-to-prison pipeline. It doesn't take a PH.D to realize that the costs of this dropout crisis don't end when a student walks out of the schoolhouse door. Three-fourths of the inmates in Texas prisons are high school dropouts.
We can either get serious about improving public schools or we can continue to build new prisons across the state to house the products of a failed system. Budgets are moral documents because they reflect our real priorities. And no budget, no budget is morally balanced that spends nearly $18,000 to house each prisoner but can find barely $6,000 to educate each child. Our state budget will be a truly moral document when we make building our kids up a higher priority than locking them away.
We can no longer simply accept test driven curriculums that are driving away our children in droves. We know how to improve our schools. Now we need a governor who wants to take advantage of that knowledge and make our public schools the best in the country
With a dropout rate near 40 percent, The Texas we hold in our hearts is not the Texas we see around us. If we want to build the Texas that's in our dreams, we must find the moral courage to face this dropout crisis with an open mind and a servant's heart.
We need to expand career and technology training programs to get all Texas students ready for 21st Century jobs. We need to explore flexible scheduling to allow students to work part-time and stay in school. We can follow the example of community leaders in Houston who have started a program called "Reach Out to Dropouts" where leaderssuch as the superintendent, the mayor's wife, and local business leaders volunteerscall kids who drop out of school and promise them personal support and backpacks full of school supplies if they re-enroll.
As Governor, I will retool our schools to start preparing our kids to achieve greatness in the 21st century. When we commit to that vision, then there's nothing on the horizon we can't reach.
http://www.chrisbell.com/blog/092206_dropouts