Alternatives and equivalents in graduation

Dropping out of school isn’t new. Even back in the good old days, while Wally and Beaver were graduating, Riff and Bernardo weren’t.

Lacking an education, now as then, leaves you unprepared for work and citizenship, and commonly translates into personal and family hardship. When too many Americans lack an education, the economy and the Republic suffer. That translates into national hardship.

Nobody knows exactly how many students aren’t finishing high school. Estimates vary based on how you define “dropout,” count G.E.D. recipients, and track students who change schools or take longer to graduate. Current statistics estimate that eighty-one percent of high school students graduate on time with a regular diploma. Roughly seven percent of 16- to 24-year-olds qualify as dropouts because they aren’t enrolled in school and hold neither a diploma nor a G.E.D. certificate.

Regardless of which statistical methodology you favor, dropping out is an issue we should address. But more important than when students are leaving school is what they’re leaving with.

In their zeal to reduce dropout rates, many schools have established “alternative” programs. These alternatives cater to students with social, behavioral, motivational and attendance problems that purportedly put them “at risk” for dropping out. One principal bills his “equivalent” alternative as an “option for kids who don’t like the strict rules, distracting atmosphere or large classes” in regular school.

Most of my students over the years weren’t crazy about strict rules and large classes. Many would’ve profited from the one-onone and small group instruction alternative programs offer. It seems wildly unfair that these students didn’t qualify for the alternative benefit because they showed up, behaved themselves and made a decent effort.

Beginning in middle school, alternative programs “meld individualized study programs with work experience.” Sometimes that means a technical or vocational class. Other times it’s the student’s regular after-school job. Some programs schedule half a day for academics, while others limit classwork to a scant 90 minutes, with most of the day “spent on real life problem-solving and regaining a lost sense of self-worth.” “Nonjudgmental” counseling sessions explore “contemporary issues” like “bullying” and “tobacco use.”

At one school, alternative eighth-graders “help out” as construction site “gofers” and at a recycling center. “Real life” activities include “raking leaves” and mastering “how to tie a tie.” Students also learn “how to obtain auto insurance or jump start a vehicle.”

There’s nothing wrong with raking leaves or learning to use jumper cables, and I’ve taught lots of my students to tie their ties on graduation night. I just didn’t consider it part of the education that had earned them their diplomas.

“Adventure education” enrolls students in outdoor activities from “trust building” games to white water rafting. Boosters justify reduced academic requirements, which include earning credits in half the time, by explaining that if alternative routes took too long, meaning they were truly equivalent to regular programs, many students would quit the alternatives as readily as they quit high school. As a “trade off,” alternative students are required to “show up for class” and “be on time,” bare minimums expected of other students.

What’s a diploma worth if in order to earn one, you literally just have to show up?

Reformers dispute that their reforms are making things worse. They don’t mention that alternative diploma programs allow students to drop out of anything most of us would recognize as a high school program without being counted as a dropout.

I’m not saying there’s only one kind of student or one kind of education. In fact, part of our problem is many reformers’ standardsbased insistence that every student needs to be prepared for college. They’re wrong. Every student doesn’t need Algebra II. Some need what’s currently condemned as a general education. Some need vocational training and apprenticeships.

Unfortunately, alternative programs aren’t necessarily offering that. Going to your regular job isn’t the same as learning a technical or vocational skill, and you shouldn’t earn high school credit for it. Learning to “cope in society” is important, but it’s not the kind of learning that earning a diploma is supposed to represent.

Twenty states have raised their legal dropout age to 18, but that won’t necessarily keep students in school or do any good, especially if “at risk” programs shortsightedly focus on being “interesting” and “motivating to kids.”

There’s a difference between trying to find interesting ways to teach students what they need to know and changing what you’re teaching them so maybe they’ll be interested.

Alternative programs commonly boast that their “students learn at their own pace.” Flexibility can be fine, whether it means taking fewer classes at a time or taking longer to graduate, as long as students have learned enough when they’re finished. Too often, though, “at their own pace” is a euphemism for learning less.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with encouraging students to remain in school, or with enabling “nontraditional students” to return for a high school education, as long as it’s really a high school education. Maybe we need several kinds of diplomas with different sets of requirements. But those requirements shouldn’t change just because some students aren’t likely to work hard enough or stick around long enough to meet them.

It sounds fine, as one principal put it, to offer students “a chance to be successful at something.” But being truly successful depends on what the something is.