From Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. To read the whole story go here.
6:36 AM Oct 20, 2014
By Ben Casselman
Five years ago, educators at Elkhart Community Schools realized they
had a problem. Their dropout rate was too high. More than one third of
the northern Indiana school district’s students weren’t graduating from
high school on schedule. Among Hispanics, who make up about a third of
the student body, the figures were even worse.
“It was a significant moment where we said we have to change the
culture,” said Gail Draper, who heads the guidance department at Elkhart
Central High School. “We had to do something to turn the tide.”
It seems to be working. In 2013, 85 percent of Elkhart’s students
graduated on time, putting the district close to the state average.
Perhaps even more remarkably, the graduation rate among Hispanics is now
equal to — or even slightly above — that of the district’s overall
population.
Elkhart’s improvement is a particularly dramatic example of a
nation-wide trend: Graduation rates are improving, especially for
Latinos.1 Nationally, the on-time graduation rate topped 80 percent
for the first time in 2012, up from 74 percent five years earlier. For
Latinos, the graduation rate is up more than 10 percentage points over
the past five years, to 76 percent.
And...what works:
“It’s hard to get an 18-year-old to think in the long term when they
can get a job for $12 an hour,” said Draper, the Elkhart guidance
counselor.
So Elkhart administrators began calling local employers and talking
to them about how by offering jobs to teenagers during school hours,
they were contributing to the dropout problem — ultimately leaving them
with a less educated workforce. In some cases, the administrators worked
with employers to turn the jobs into internships, earning students
school credit. And they developed an after-hours school program to help
students who needed to work during the day stay in school.
“We try and work with the students in the circumstances that they’re in,” Draper said.
Draper recalled one student who had arrived in Elkhart from Mexico in
his sophomore year speaking no English. He was a particularly promising
student — until one day he walked into the guidance office and
announced he was dropping out. His mother had lost her job. He needed to
go to work.
“We said no, you can’t do that. You’re too smart,” Draper said. The
school raced to find help for the student and his family, reaching out
to local community groups to find financial support and working with the
student to ensure he could stay in school while working. Draper said
the experience showed the importance of relationships — the student’s
relationship with his advisor, where he felt comfortable revealing his
family’s problems, and the school’s relationship with the community,
where they could find a solution.
It worked. The student stayed in school and is on track to graduate with his class this spring — with honors.
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