Blogs on Dropout Prevention

It has become an article of faith in the Washington thinktankocracy that teachers are the most important factor in their students' success. That's not an entirely bad thing. What professional doesn't want to be thought important?

But think-tank dwellers often draw the wrong conclusions from this claim. Most of their talk about teachers focuses on how to fire the bad ones, hire the good ones, and pay the really good ones. Too few people spare a thought for the environment and support teachers need to succeed.

Last week, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, organized by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

Recently, consultants who were reviewing the data systems the California Department of Education uses to track student performance interviewed me. I have had to wrestle with how I feel about the whole process, because unfortunately, I think the emphasis on data has not been the boon to students and educators that was promised.

At a recent professional-development day, I challenged my colleagues to think about how we could reduce the number of students in our lower division (grades nine and ten) -- especially the ninth graders -- who fail high school courses. "What if we decided that failure is not an option, and that success is the only choice available to us?" I asked them.