Rice experts offer solutions to the Texas dropout crisis

Rice experts offer solutions to the Texas dropout crisis
Conference features student-engagement initiatives 

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

With Texas schools losing more than 100,000 students a year, many have sought effective ways to engage students and encourage them to stay in school. More than 270 Texas teachers, school administrators, parents and policymakers attended the “Solutions to the Texas Dropout Crisis” conference Sept. 26, sponsored in part by Rice University’s Center for Education.

The conference featured discussions and research from a number of leading education experts with one common message: Solutions should be set in motion now.

Eileen Coppola, associate director of research at the Center for Education, spoke about the connection between students being disengaged from school and dropping out.

JEFF FITLOW

Rice’s Stephen Klineberg addressed more than 270 attendants last week at the Solutions to the Texas Dropout Crisis Conference. He spoke about the impact dropout rates will have on Houston and its future.

“The students who are dropping out are disengaged,” said Coppola. “Other correlations exist, but this is the greatest. So we need to figure out what we can do to engage our students and how we can eliminate the obstacles that hinder them.”

Coppola identified common sentiments among dropouts: feeling that schoolwork is meaningless, identifying themselves as dumb and thinking that school cannot help them. On the other hand, students who are engaged in school feel challenged but supported and part of a strong community.

“We need to create an exciting intellectual culture in our schools to keep our kids in school. Joy, curiosity and authenticity should be in every classroom,” Coppola said. “The dropout rate is a real cause for concern. This has become a crisis.”

To combat the crisis, Coppola suggested examining current policies that affect school curricula and processes, noting that they should be designed to support students as individual learners with distinct patterns of development.

Stephen Klineberg, Rice professor of sociology, spoke about the impact dropout rates will have on Houston and its future. Education has become much more important as the global economy has shifted from industrial-based to knowledge-based. The traditional ”blue collar path” to financial security has largely disappeared, he said. Most good-paying jobs today require high levels of technical skills and educational credentials, and the income inequalities are growing rapidly, predicated above all else on access to quality education, he stressed.

“We need a far more educated workforce to advance as a city and a nation,” Klineberg said. “That is the key to reducing the growing inequalities. The only way to improve the lot of the poor is to invest in their skills.”

Results from the annual Houston Area Survey show that the public has grasped the new realities. In the 2006 survey, 77 percent of area residents disagreed that “a high school education is enough to get a good job.” In 2007, 61 percent agreed “there are very few good jobs in today’s economy for people without a college education.”

Meanwhile, as predominantly Anglo baby boomers move rapidly into retirement, the young people who will be the workers and taxpayers in the new century are disproportionately non-Anglo and considerably less well-off.

Of all the 210,000 students in Houston Independent School District classes, from kindergarten through grade 12, 88 percent are blacks or Latinos — the two groups most likely to be living in poverty and historically least well-served by the region’s educational and social service institutions.

“It is a safe statement to make that if Houston’s African-American and Latino young people are unprepared to succeed in the knowledge economy of the 21st century, it is hard to envision a prosperous future for the region as a whole,” Klineberg said.

Klineberg concluded that Houston is in crisis, but he noted that the Chinese symbol for crisis is made up of two characters, one signifying “danger” and the other, “opportunity.”

Sponsors of the conference included Children at Risk, One Voice, Andrews Kurth LLP, the Kayser Foundation, Communities in Schools, Houston A+ Challenge, Project GRAD Houston, the Rice University Center for Education, University of Houston College of Education and the University of St. Thomas.