Follow The…What?
By Mitch Berg
The Strib Editorial Board acts like a blindfolded man examining a cow, and declaring what he’s prodding at to be two powderhorns, a dusting broom, a walking cane and a fur rug.
Sometimes a cow is just a cow.
And sometimes a financial scam is just a financial scam. In this case, it’s the state’s “Alternative Learning Centers” – schools for kids who are having trouble in the traditional school system.
Today, almost 150,000 — nearly 20 percent of state public school students — go to Alternative Learning Centers (ALCs). But a May 13 story by Star Tribune reporter Jim Walsh looked behind those numbers to reveal some troubling issues.Yes, students are going to the schools in droves, but what happens after they get there? A majority of them never take standardized tests or graduate. A quarter to a half of them are absent most days. So is it good enough that only a tiny number of alternative students are being educated — or are the schools too often holding areas that delay the dropout process for a few years?
The Strib feels about the cow, and finds a wet sloppy thing that it figures is a leather washcloth:
Those and other questions raised in Walsh’s story deserve answers. The state and school districts should do a better job of tracking and evaluating ALCs and students. And more should be done to find effective ways to assess and educate the most challenging students. Tens of thousands of youth are involved; if they fail to get a basic education, their earning capacity and quality of life are imperiled. Moreover, the state’s future workforce and economy will be negatively affected.
It notes a smell – and, in noting “something smells like bulls**t”, comes perilously close to the truth:
Now some observers worry that enrollments have swelled because district officials use the schools as “dumping grounds” for the worst students. There is also concern from some quarters that districts keep the students in the system because of the $200 plus million in state funding they attract.
…but then notices the long legs with the hard ends, and figures it’s part leather dining room table:
One of the original and strongest arguments for the learning centers is that they keep students in school who would otherwise drop out.
They came so close to the truth.
School Funding 101: Schools get an amount of money for every day a student attends. If the student is absent – or drops out – that money doesn’t go to the district.
The beast doesn’t like being starved.
Schools have ample tools – including the cooperation of well-funded departments of local County Attorney’s offices – to keep “truant” kids (defined as kids whose absence or tardiness jeopardizes that per diem payment). But thanks to No Child Left Behind, schools have also become obsessed with test scores. Students who can’t, or won’t, excel on the standardized tests that have become public schools raison d’etre since NCLB need (although they’ll never say it) to get rid of the problem kids…
…but if those kids drop out of school, the districts lose the per diem that they get for each student attending.
ALC’s solve this Catch 22, giving districts a place to continue mandatory attendance (and collecting of the per-student per diem, naturally) while firewalling all those inconvenient bad test scores in a place where they won’t be held against all the other schools. Not unlike a grocery store that hides rotting merchandise under and behind the fresh stuff, except that the “rotting merchandise” is the student body.
The idea is that with more time and individualized attention, students who couldn’t make it in a traditional school can still earn a high school diploma. Then, after achieving that goal, some will be inspired to go on to higher education.
Except that “extra attention” really doesn’t exist – ALC is basically an unstructured hodgepodge, and graduation is entirely subject (at least in Saint Paul) to the individual students’ motivation to get that diploma – a goal that doesn’t mean much to everyone who is sent there).
At most alternative schools fewer than 25 percent of the students took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment; among those who did, only 22 percent passed the reading exam and 4 percent passed the math test.
That’s not good enough. State, district and alternative school officials must work together to evaluate ALC programs and find ways to raise their success rates.
Yeah, that’d be nice – but that’s not the point of having ALC. And the Strib should know that.
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:18 am
I can’t tell which side you’re really on, but I know which one I’m on. My son was headed for drop-out. The ALC got him his HS diploma, and he went on to college after that (and graduated). It worked because of the “individual attention” and because the ALC wasn’t rigidly keyed into trying to pass some standardized test and some standardized curriculum. If you learned to read and write and speak and figure some, they didn’t care what it was called so long as you were learning /something/. I’m at least as cynical as you are about the motivations of our illustrious Boreds of Education, but I see the ALC as a useful and truly “alternative” means of educating certain students. Now, if we would just give every kid a voucher, EVERY parent could decide whether they wanted “regular” school or some alternative that might suit them better. And it would cost less, so I guess that’s the insurmountable problem.
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:38 am
J,
I should point out that it’s not the institution of the ALC – a self-paced alternative for kids who won’t or can’t assimilate with the regular “model” high school – that bothers me. I’ve known kids who graduated from ALC for whom it was, individually, a great experience.
What I DON’T like is that the districts use ALC as a way to get “problem” kids out of the way of their testing program, and to keep the money coming in.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Thank you for that explanation. I agree, but the most reasonable solution would not be limiting the ALC option, and the use of the ALC to keep the NCLB off the district’s case, by “dumping” the students they have already failed there, simply pale in comparison to the manifold ways in which they failed those kids in the first place.