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State Legislatures Magazine: June 2001

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the June 2001 issue of NCSL's magazine, State Legislatures. To order copies or to subscribe, contact the marketing department at (303) 364-7700.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

West Virginia's Mountain Harmony

Dropout Rates Will Increase

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Getting kids to stay in school is tough. But Louisiana thinks it has an idea that's working.

By Tracy J. Schmidt
Representative Noble Ellington was out campaigning for a state Senate seat in his rural northeastern Louisiana district one fall day in 1996. He was walking door-to-door and getting reacquainted with his constituents. As he approached one house, he noticed several young men lifting weights in the carport. Realizing that they probably should have been in school, he sat down to talk to them and soon learned that they had dropped out of high school. Instead of attending classes, they were doing seasonal work for farmers and other types of short-term jobs.

Curious as to why they had left school, Ellington found out that they couldn't see any connection between going to school and their future employment. "My feeling is education should be more than just preparing some for college, but should expose all young people to other options out there," Ellington says.

"No Child Left Behind" is the current mantra in Washington, D.C., as the Bush administration's initiative begins to shape proposed federal policy. States like Louisiana have already added this concept to their education system. The United States loses the potential of approximately 524,000 youths who choose to drop out of school every year. This choice, according to statistics, can lead to a lifetime of low-paying jobs, a higher rate of incarceration and a greater chance for women becoming young, single mothers raising children in poverty. A study for one city estimated that a year's worth of dropouts cost $3.2 billion in lost earnings and more than $400 million in social services over a lifetime. But Senator Ellington wasn't only concerned about the economic impact of their choices, he was concerned about their future quality of life.

He won his Senate race. And he set out to pass legislation to help rectify a sad statistical fact of life in Louisiana-an 11.6 percent dropout rate, the highest of 37 states reporting and double the national average, according to the National Center on Education Statistics (1996-1997 data). The senator thought the traditional mindset of the education system in Louisiana had to change. No longer should the majority of energy and resources go to preparing a minority of students who were college-bound, leaving fewer resources and less attention to those students who struggled and sometimes gave up and dropped out of school. He believed that if all students were challenged by the same high standards and encouraged to think and plan ahead after graduation to go on to college or into a career, more young people would have the confidence to stay in school.

Other legislators agreed the education system needed to be relevant for all youth. "I was in the education field for 33 years, both in elementary and secondary schools," says Louisiana Representative Joe Salter. "Take math for example, students couldn't see the practical application. They couldn't relate to how it was going to help them."

"We needed a user-friendly approach. We felt that providing more alternative means of learning would help keep kids in school. Once you lose students, it's hard to get them back," Senator Ellington says. Working with Chris Weaver, the governor's workforce liaison, and Billy Crawford, state assistant superintendent of instruction, Ellington and the Senate Education Committee staff wrote a draft of the bill.

"After looking at research on the variety of students' learning styles," Weaver explains, "we thought the concepts used for school-to-work, especially the emphasis on high standards for all and applied learning techniques [learning by doing], would help reach our goal of engaging all kids with learning. We wanted legislation to influence school districts to look at what they were offering."

The legislation did just that. In addition to career exploration in middle school, the bill asked guidance counselors to work with students and parents to set education and career goals. Most important, the bill required school districts to offer multiple career fields by 2005 and design a comprehensive curriculum for at least one career major by 2006. The career major must include rigorous college preparatory academic requirements plus technical courses that teach workplace-relevant skills. For example, a school district may develop a health career option. Core courses such as English, math and science would all include links to real-life situations in health-related careers, like doctors, nurses, hospital administrators or hospice workers. The relevance brought to the classroom helps students better grasp a potentially dry lesson in math, say perhaps converting liters to milliliters, since students may be more interested in it as a way to figure out the right dosage for a patient. Furthermore, lessons can be interconnected among subjects. A student may learn how to determine a dosage based on weight in math class, then learn in biology class how the correct dose of chicken pox vaccine works in the body. This approach to learning seems to better engage students in their studies, especially when it's in a career field they are interested in.

In addition to the core academic course work that is tied to their career major, students also take specific career or technical courses. If a student wants a career in technical drafting within the engineering and industrial technologies career major, she may take basic and advanced technical drafting, architectural drafting and physics for technology. A basic computer course is also required.

As the bill made its way through the Legislature, amendments were made to respond to the most frequent criticisms. "It was trial and error. If it seemed that there was a problem to begin with, we made changes to the bill, adding detail as needed," said Senator Ellington.

Bill clarifications emphasized how rigorous the core academic courses in the career majors would be. An amendment was added to underscore that all students choose career options, meet all state graduation and testing requirements and that graduating with a career option did not preclude entering college. The opposition that pushed for these amendments felt that the career option might "dumb-down" the curriculum. To the contrary, it was Ellington's intent that the law stimulate all students to excel and achieve, not just those who were "college-bound."

Others opposed to the bill felt that it would track students into predetermined and fixed career paths. To answer these concerns, an amendment specified an annual review of each student's five-year educational plan among the student, parents and school adviser. "We took out all references to tracking and emphasized the many options available through clusters of occupations," said Weaver. Students may change their career option each year if they wish.

Although the bill's progress through the Legislature was slow, none of these arguments was insurmountable. "We just had to educate them [the members] on this golden opportunity to reduce the dropout rate," Ellington said. He, Chris Weaver and Billy Crawford testified in both Senate and House education committee hearings. After much discussion and several amendments, the bill passed the Senate, 20 to 6, and the House, 91 to 4, and became Louisiana's Career Options Act of 1997.

Since passage, the state's school-to-work (STW) grant has emphasized counseling, career planning and options in nine regional partnerships. These activities have helped school districts adopt the career-option model. "All of this is like a journey, and we're starting to see system change," Weaver said. In fact, the entire state is seeing positive results. The 1997-1998 Louisiana dropout rate was down to 10.2 percent, meaning that 15,128 more students stayed in school. The dropout rate for the 1998-1999 school year was even better, 9.4 percent, according to Louisiana's Education Progress Report. "We're now catching more students, instead of letting them fall through the cracks, " says Representative Joe Salter, who sits on the state's school-to-work advisory council.

West Virginia's Mountain Harmony

West Virginia faced a similar crisis in its school system. The schools were educating a few to go onto college, but not for everyone to do well. A circuit court ruling in the early 1980s prompted the state to look at how it should prepare all students for life after graduation, including an understanding of all postsecondary and career options available.

With strong guidance from the business and education communities, the Legislature and the governor led a statewide effort to strengthen the state's education system. This culminated with the 1996 Jobs through Education Act. The law aims to better prepare students by making certain that they understand the connection between school, work and higher education.

The main principles of raising standards for all students, integrating technology and activities that help the student learn by doing into the curricula, and instilling the desire in students for lifelong learning are starting to make a difference in West Virginia. Attendance is up. Dropout rates are down. Test scores are improving, and college attendance has risen by 10 percent. "The legislation has really related high school to higher education, made kids more aware and more astute about what's expected of them for a job and helped them discover that they really should have goals beyond high school," says Delegate Jerry Mezzatesta, chair of the House Education Committee.

"We started a conversation with businesses and higher education institutions, posing the question, 'What do graduates need when they leave school?'" says Jim McKay, the West Virginia Education Alliance interim executive director. "We found that the answer was the same for two-year and four-year institutions, as well as businesses ... high academic skills and certain personal attributes, like a good work ethic, ability to work on a team and reliability."

The Education Alliance's research culminated with publication of Ready for What? in 1995. It recommended eliminating the tracking of students into either vocational or college preparatory classes and pressed for involvement by the business community to bring relevancy to learning.

"We needed legislation to do two things," says Senator Lloyd Jackson II. "First, we needed to pull together all the pieces of the standards-based education system. Second, we needed to more aggressively focus the system on the needs of students to enter higher education or the world of work."

A component of the bill focused on integrating technology into the classroom, teacher training and the curricula. Legislators felt infusing education with technology was an important step to keep West Virginia competitive in the new economy.

With the passage of the law, the state board of education developed a system of career clusters for high schools. The clusters contained three programs of study: professional, skilled and entry. High schools began developing stronger links with local colleges and universities that allowed students to earn credit that automatically transferred.

Senator Roman Prezioso, who was chair of the House Education Committee at the time of the reform, saw the need for a seamless education process to better prepare all students. "It's extremely important to every West Virginian's future that we prepare students to be very competitive especially since we are dealing with a global economy. In order to do that, a definitive change in education was needed."

Dropout Rates Will Increase

Predictions that dropout rates will rise in the next 10 years are supported by two trends-a greater number of young people ages 16 to 24 (with the highest expected growth in minority populations) and the implications of high stakes testing on high poverty schools. Research indicates that students held back grades have a higher incidence of dropping out.

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