Advice on Preventing Dropouts--From a Former Dropout

I found this article while reading the Marshall Memo: It's an interesting read.

In this Education Week article, author William Towne, who dropped out of high school but eventually graduated with honors from the University of Southern California, takes note of the nation’s “appalling” dropout rate and faults education reformers for not listening to a very important group: the dropouts themselves. “Until reformers start listening to the students who have dropped out or are currently failing,” he says, “their attempts to reform schools also will fail.”

            Towne says that when he was in school, he believed he would grow up to be a sports hero or rap superstar and school was therefore irrelevant. In addition, he found his classes boring. “After analyzing my own grade-school failures and speaking with dozens of recent dropouts,” he says, “it’s clear to me that teacher effectiveness is the silver bullet. While programs like No Child Left Behind choose to focus on the need for “highly qualified” teachers, the real emphasis should be on creating highly effective teachers.”

Teachers need to stop lecturing, Towne continues. “Instead, find ways to make the lessons fun, engaging, and, most important, relevant to students’ lives… Making the lesson fun makes us want to come to class. We want to know what cool new thing will happen today. What will the teacher do next? We have to be there to find out. The last thing we want is to skip class and hear the next day how much fun it was.”

            Towne also advocates involving students in making rules and listening to their ideas on creative lesson ideas, including a game-show format. He says that students should be assigned books in their areas of interest (“Forget Shakespeare for now”), and he likes the idea of cooperative learning groups, with grades based on each student’s progress.

            Summing up, he says, “It’s that simple. Maybe it just takes a high-school dropout to see it.”

“A Dropout’s Guide to Education Reform” by William Towne in Education Week, Oct. 21, 2009 (Vol. 29, #8, p. 25) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/10/21/08towne.h29.html