Potential School Dropout or Late Bloomer with High Potential - Do adult attitudes regarding struggling ninth grade students make a difference?

So often I see students in the ninth grade who are completely overwhelmed by the demands of of the "Big School". They soon find that they can not keep up with the rate and pace of work, and often failing key core courses. Some demonstrate increasingly disruptive behaviors and express their discontent in ways that rub teachers and administrator the wrong way.

As a school psychologist, I know that many of these students have hidden strengths and talents, but the curriculum they face does not match the way they learn.

What are the consequences of this problem? It isn't pretty.

Ninth grade students have the highest rate of failure in grade, detentions, expulsions, suspensions, long-term alternative school placements, and school drop-out.

Despite various efforts to improve outcomes for high school students, things don't change from year to year. Cohort after cohort of teens follow the same path, and this is documented by similar statistics throughout most of the U.S.

The following chart shows what I mean. It outlines the average number of short term suspensions of students at various levels of the educational system in North Carolina from 2002-03 through 2006-07:



For more information about the problems young people face when entering the ninth grade, and links to some solutions, see the following post:

"Ninth Grade Tipping Point: What Happens in the First Year of High School Impacts Graduation and Dropout Rates"

For an interesting story about one man's personal experience as a late bloomer, take a look at
"Confessions of a Late Bloomer "
"We have fixed notions about the time course of success and the nature of talent that encourage us to write off the very people who are most likely to (eventually) change the world."
Scott Barry Kaufman
Psychology Today Nov/Dec 2008

Ninth Grade Tipping Point: What happens in the first year of high school impacts graduation and dropout rates.

A recent set of articles in Education Week, Diplomas Count: School to College, supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discusses the need to "bridge the divide between precollegiate and higher education".

The article goes on to say that "despite the vital importance of education to young people’s job prospects, Diplomas Count 2008 projects that 1.23 million students will fail to graduate from high school this year. The lowest graduation rates are among African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students."

Powerpoint Presentation
Press Release
Contacts:
Robert Johnston, (202) 955-9450, ext. 313, rjohnston AT commworksllc DOT com
Kari Hudnell, (202) 955-9450, ext. 324, khudnell AT commworksllc DOT com

I was planning on posting about this topic several weeks ago. With the latest news about the persistence of our nation's low graduation rate, I thought it would be important to take a few minutes and share what I worked on during the first several months of this year.

Last semester, I took a Visualization and Visual Communication course in the computer science department at UNCC, taught by Dr. Robert Kosara. My team originally focused on the topic of school violence and related risk factors. After looking at a variety of data sets, we discovered that young people who fall within the ninth grade age range have high rates of problems across a variety of factors and indicators.

We quickly learned that risk factors related to violence, adolescent mental health, and school dropout are studied and analyzed by a variety of agencies and organizations, and the data is culled from many sources.

The problem for information visualization is to make this data meaningful, so that it can be easily understood by decision makers who are responsible for implementing procedures and policies that result in positive outcomes.

At the time that we completed our work, we did not have the information included in the Diploma Counts 2008 report. One data set we did not consider at the time relates to the level of experience of ninth grade teachers. An article written in Education Week, after the semester ended, highlights this problem in the Philadelphia high schools. Ninth grade students are taught by the least-experienced teachers.

My hunch, given the data we covered last semester, is this is the case in many school districts nation-wide.

Having worked in high schools for many years as a school psychologist, in several districts, I think this might be true. More experienced teachers wind up teaching Advanced Placement, Honors, and IB courses. Fresh-out-of-college and lateral entry math teachers end up teaching algebra to ninth grade students. Many of these students previously failed the subject.

For our project, we took data sets and ran quite a bit of the data in ManyEyes, part of IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group, to experiment with the different forms of data visualization and to see if we prepared the data appropriately.

(I will post some pictures and of our final project soon, along with a reference list.)

Below are some graphs we found as we were gathering information for our project:


Graduation Project, 2007 EdWeek Maps EPE Research Center



Annual Study of Suspensions and Expulsions, 2006-07 Report to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee, Public Schools of North Carolina State Board of Education Department of Public Instructions

Alternative Learning Placements




Expulsions by grade level

"The ninth grade short-term suspension totals in the chart reveal a definite upward trend over the last five years. The total of 71,494 short-term suspensions received by ninth graders in 2006-07 is 22.6% higher than the 58,335 received in 2002-03."

"Students who are expelled from a school and who fail to return to school are coded with “Expulsion” (EXPL) as a reason for dropping out. These students are not included in the official counts or rates that appear in this report. In 2006-2007, there were 72 dropout events coded with EXPL, 69 of which were in grades 9 through 12."


Report to the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee Annual Report on Dropout Events and Rates Public Schools of North Carolina, State Board of Education
Department of Public Instruction





Here is something from the Milwaukee Public Schools:




A few references:

Collins, L., Fruth, L., Sessa,M., Laird, E. The Right Data to the Right People at the Right Time: How Interoperability Helps America's Students.
June 2007

Data Quality Campaign
http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/

Linking Education and Social Services Data to Improve Child Welfare October 2007
http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/files/Meetings-DQC_Quarterly_Issue_Brief_091807.pdf

Age Distribution of Dropouts
NC Annual Report of School Violence 2006-07
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=704133

Report on the Implementation of the Gun-Free Schools Act in the States and Outlying Areas 2003-04

Short Term Suspensions, Long Term Consequences, Real Life Solutions pdf
(Action for Children, N.C.)

Dismantling the School to Prison Pipeline (pdf)
NAACP

Smartphones in Education: Project K-Nect in North Carolina

If you serve on an RTI or Problem-Solving Team at the high school level, you know how difficult it is to find evidence-based resources for interventions that are geared for students beyond the elementary school level.

The project currently targets ninth grade students in Onslow, Durham, and Winston-Salem/Forsyth counties in North Carolina.

Ninth grade is important grade to target, since ninth grade historically is the level with the highest percentage of students who are required to repeat a grade. Failing Algebra is often one of the reasons behind this phenomenon. Ninth grade is also the level that experiences a significant increase in suspensions. Students who fall into one or both of these categories have a higher risk of dropping out of school.

Project K-Nect is something that is worth following:

"Project K-Nect is design to address three core needs that include the lack of at-home Internet Access for our country's poorest families, 21st century skills development, and the math and science deficit."

The project is a collaboration between the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, DMC -Digital Millennial Consulting, and Wireless Reach (Qualcomm).


From the website -

"Goals & Objectives:

To develop, implement and test an integrated system that will deliver supplemental digital instructional content and foster peer to peer collaboration through mobile devices to increase
mathematic achievement for 9th and 10th grade students in the State of North Carolina.

To test the efficacy and viability of mobile devices as digital assets that can be utilized as both a social communications tool and educational resource for students in US secondary education institutions.

To foster the design of a system that enables safe closed social, educational communications between students, teachers and parents.

To empower students with 21st century skills through secondary education institutions

To determine if mobile devices can be utilized as a mechanism for reducing the disparity between those who are and are not connected with particular attention on rural areas within the State.

The project targets 9th grade "at-risk" students who have limited math proficiency, limited or no access to a home computer or the internet at home."

Research questions involved in this project, according to the website:
1.Do positive correlations exist between cell phone usage and student performance?
2.Does cell phone usage and student performance correlate positively to the implementation and technology?
3.Can education delivered through mobile devices increase access to e-learning for students with no home access otherwise?
4.Can mobile devices be utilized as a mechanism for increasing student achievement among academically at-risk students?
5.Can math curricula delivered through comfortable and familiar cell phones increase students’ levels of interest in math?
6.Do positive correlations exist between peer-to-peer social networking for mathematics support and student achievement?
7.Do students’ report satisfaction and useful learning support from the social networking systems?

NCDPI Press Release

NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION AND DIGITAL MILLENNIAL CONSULTING JOIN WITH QUALCOMM TO GIVE 100 SMARTPHONES TO STUDENTS IN NORTH CAROLINA

NCDPI Contacts:
Vanessa Jeter, Communications Director
Phone: 919.807.3469
Email: vjeter@dpi.state.nc.us

Digital Millennial Consulting Contacts:
Shawn Gross, Project Manager
Phone: 919.386.0341
Email: info@projectknect.org

Qualcomm Contacts:
Yennie Rautenberg, Corporate Communications
Phone: 858.845.5959
Email: corpcomm@qualcomm.com

John Gilbert, Investor Relations
Phone: 858.658.4813
Email: ir@qualcomm.com

Note: For more information about the use of hand-held devices for education, do a search on this blog as well as the Interactive Multimedia Technology blog.