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2004-02-24 - 1:38 p.m.

Enabling or Educating?

Some days I sit in my office and accomplish very little. On those days my mind is all knotted up wondering just what the hell it is we’re doing in schools today.

Over time my questioning of the workings of my school has extended to include all American schools. We’ve gone from doing what’s right to taking the easy way out; we’ve gone from being educators to being enablers.

Very simply: We let kids do whatever they want to do.

Twenty-one years ago The National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. The purpose of the report was to call attention to the quality of education in America, help define the problems afflicting American education and provide solutions. The media grabbed this bone and exposed the secret: the schools were bleeding dropouts at an alarming rate.

The proverbial shit hit the fan.

In our haste to treat and heal the malignancy, we implemented weak dropout prevention programs in our schools. In our rush to cure the problem (both the dropout rate and the media attention) we didn’t give much thought or evaluation to the overall outcomes of these programs. Although there was a slight rise in persistence to graduation percentages, a disturbing number of kids were still dropping out of secondary schools. Our programs were not working, and the heat was still on to fix our schools. It was back to the drawing board where we mucked together new, even more ineffectual programs to keep kids in school. Instead of staunching the dropout rate, we lost control of the educational process and have become institutions of “anything goes as long as we give the kid a diploma.”

Creativity and flexibility are certainly necessary when working with kids, but creativity and flexibility are not synonymous with ineptitude and incompetence. We have slipshod schools with no consequences, and the product we’re putting out is inferior and faulty.

An example: Last week a senior student decided it was too hard to get up and arrive at her first hour class on time. In her mind the options were: l) I’ll quit if you don’t; 2) let me come to school at 11 and give me credit anyway. She now arrives at school at 11 each day. She’ll be in line to graduate on May 25th.

Another example: For this entire semester another senior has refused to show up for his academic classes—American History and physical science—which he needs to complete core graduation requirements. He does, however, come to his construction technology program. The solution? He can come to construction technology all day and receive required credit in history and science and meet graduation requirements.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but we have turned the keys of the asylum over to the inmates in our desire for lower dropout rates and higher graduation statistics.

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