SUMMARY: High school valedictorians are the best in their class academically. But a new report finds that the top graduates of Boston’s public high schools are encountering great obstacles to attaining educational and economic milestones. John Yang talks to the Boston Globe's Malcolm Gay, one of the story's reporters, about how former stars are struggling and why success takes more than scholarship money.
SUMMARY: In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, a Minnesota high school championship baseball game ended when a pitcher struck out his childhood friend. Watch what happened next.
SUMMARY: Students, parents and teachers suffered the agony of a school shooting on Friday morning near Galveston, Texas, where at least 10 people were murdered and 10 more wounded. The suspect, a 17-year-old according to media reports, is being held on a capital murder charge. Judy Woodruff learns more from Gail Delaughter of Houston Public Media.
SUMMARY: A California high school is using song to examine a painful chapter in U.S. history. “In America” is an oratorio composed by students at Van Nuys High School, with help from the Los Angeles Master Chorale, that reflects on the experiences of Japanese-Americans who were forced to leave their homes for internment camps during World War II. Jeffrey Brown reports from Los Angeles.
SUMMARY: This time of year, high school seniors and their families are thinking about where they’ll be headed to college in the fall. In “There Is Life After College,” author Jeffrey Selingo examines how one’s post-college years are influenced by crucial choices made before students even enroll. Selingo sits down with William Brangham for a conversation.
FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA: No matter what path any of us on the stage took to our success, we all know that completing your education past high school is the most important thing you can do to reach your dreams. That’s why we’re here. So, while you all might be in awe of us, let me tell you, we are in awe of you.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): High schoolers and their parents are obviously focused on what school they will go to, but a new book argues there are more important things to consider.
The book is called “There Is Life After College.” Jeffrey Selingo is the author. I talked with him yesterday.
Jeff, if I can discern a basic thesis from you book, it’s not so much where you go to college, but it’s what you do while you’re in college. Is that right?
JEFFREY SELINGO, Author, “There Is Life After College”: That’s right.
It used to be as long that, as you had a bachelor’s degree from a college, any college, really, you would be golden in the job market. It was really the way that you got jobs years ago.
But now the fact of the matter is that there’s a lot of noise around the signal of a bachelor’s degree. So it’s really important what you do while you’re there, the experiential learning that you get, internships, projects, study abroad, and activities like that, cocurricular activities, whether it’s athletics or clubs.
And, most importantly, you don’t take on too much debt. The more debt that you take on in college, the fewer options you have after college to take essentially any job you want anywhere in the country, which would be good for your career, and instead you’re basing your career decisions on how much money you’re going to make.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: In one of the early chapters of your book, you categorize graduates after college into three categories.
You have the sprinters, the wanderers, and the stragglers. What do those delineations tell us about post-college life today?
SUMMARY: In a Texas border town where nearly all high school students live in poverty, the school district is trying an experiment to get more kids into college. Instead of waiting until students graduate to enroll them in higher education, the school is pairing with a local college to offer courses for free. Hari Sreenivasan looks at whether this method for closing the college graduation gap is working.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): When superintendent Daniel King walks the halls of his South Texas high schools…
DANIEL KING, Superintendent, Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Independent School District: How it’s going? How are you guys doing?
HARI SREENIVASAN: … he’s not focused on the fact that nearly all of his students live in poverty or that almost half learned English as a second language. What King talks about almost exclusively is college.
DANIEL KING: Have you started college classes already?
STUDENT: Yes.
HARI SREENIVASAN: In a district on the Mexican border where most adults have no college education, Daniel King is intent on ensuring that their children get one before they even leave high school.
DANIEL KING: What are you going to study?
STUDENT: In the medical field.
DANIEL KING: In the medical field? Any idea what yet or…
HARI SREENIVASAN: Seven years ago, King’s district, Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, partnered with South Texas College to offer classes for free to all 8,000-plus high school students.
DANIEL KING: It brings a lot of purpose to high school, because college becomes something concrete for them.
Are you going to have an associate degree or…
DANIEL KING: These students have the potential to leave here with two years of college under their belt. So, that’s a big economic savings.
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HARI SREENIVASAN: So far, more than 95 percent of the students who graduated Pharr-San Juan-Alamo District with an associate’s degree have gone on to pursue their bachelor’s.
SUMMARY: While high school graduation rates have climbed steadily the last decade to an all-time high, a new investigation by NPR finds reasons to question the increases. Federal data show 81 percent of students finish, but the value of a high school diploma can vary widely depending on the state and the student’s path. William Brangham learns more from Anya Kamenetz, lead education blogger for NPR.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): High school seniors are graduating across the country this month. Federal officials laud the fact that graduation rates have climbed steadily through the last decade.
But new reporting calls into question whether those numbers are rising for all the right reasons.
William Brangham brings us the details.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): High school graduation rates are at an all-time high. Federal data show 81 percent of students finish, and finish on time.
But a new investigation by NPR finds reasons to question that number. Their reporting found that the value of a high school diploma can vary widely between, and even within, states. In just nine states and the District of Columbia, students must complete required classes to be considered “college-ready” and to earn a diploma. Twenty-three states allow students to opt in, or out, of a more rigorous path to graduation.
That leaves 18 states with requirements below what experts say students need for their next step in life.
NPR’s Anya Kamenetz has been working on the series and joins me now.
Anya, let’s talk initially about this 81 percent graduation rate number. You say in your reporting that we should take that number with a big grain of salt. Why?
ANYA KAMENETZ, Lead Education Blogger, NPR: Well, that’s exactly what researchers are saying too.
And the reason is that other indicators such as the NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, remediation rate at colleges, and even SAT and ACT scores, those are all flat. So the fact that we have seen a 10-point gain or so in the last decade in the high school graduation rate really should be giving us pause.
SUMMARY: At the Baltimore School for the Arts, students are admitted solely on their artistic potential; notable alumni of the pre-professional high school includes Jada Pinkett Smith and designer Christian Siriano. We meet some of the educators and current students who bring passion and dedication to every school day.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to a school training the next generation of great artists.
At the Baltimore School for the Arts, a pre-professional high school, students are admitted solely on their artistic potential without a review of any academic grades. Still, the school’s students have some of the highest tests scores in the state of Maryland. Notable alumni include actor Jada Pinkett Smith and fashion designer Christian Siriano.
We followed the students before the recent protests and unrest in the city and found their combination of dedication and focus, inspiring. Take a look.
MATEEN MILAN, Student: My family isn’t in the arts. I’m the only person who really does, like, classical music. I’m the only person who like takes lessons and goes to a school like this. My name is Mateen Milan. I’m in the 12th grade and I go to Baltimore School for the Arts.
MAURICE MOUZON, Student: It all started out when I was just on my own doing street dance. My friends went and told my teacher that I was dancing. I showed her and she told me that I should try out for Baltimore School for the Arts. My name is Maurice Mouzon. I’m a 12th grader at Baltimore School for the Arts.
CHRIS FORD, Director, Baltimore School for the Arts: Kids enter by audition. We don’t look at their academics at all, which is an interesting piece. And they follow a pre-professional arts program, as well as a college prep academic program.
My name is Chris Ford, and I’m the director of the Baltimore School for the Arts.
Statement: “At one San Diego public charter school, assaults on campus involving mostly black and Hispanic students occur almost daily,” wrote Vicki E. Alger, an education researcher, in a story for the National Review (titled "Obama’s Two-Front War on Kids" to show where they lean).
Rating: False
Analysis: Lincoln High School’s reputation might be its worst enemy.
Since it reopened with a new campus in 2007, Lincoln has struggled to “rise like a phoenix,” as a former principal once put it, from a disappointing past. The school has turned over leadership and hemorrhaged students. Students struggled to raise their test scores higher than the district’s bottom rung. Lincoln has been portrayed as a place that is simply unsafe to send kids.
A lot of those are valid concerns. Numbers bear out the students who’ve struggled academically and those who have left the school. But some of what’s attributed to the school simply isn’t accurate.
Last month, National Review published a story arguing that softening school discipline policies will likely result in more dangerous schools – places where black and brown students aren’t held accountable for bad behavior and assaults occur on a near-daily basis.
The article’s author, Vicki E. Alger, is a fellow with the Independent Institute, a non-partisan education think tank, and author of a forthcoming book on the history of the U.S Department of Education.
The thrust of her piece was that by focusing on racial disparities in school discipline rates, the federal government is implicitly discouraging schools from punishing black and Hispanic students. Eventually schools give these students a pass for bad behavior, she argues, thus making them even more dangerous.
Here’s a section from the piece:
“Several California school districts that adopted similar quota-based discipline “remedies” are coping with increased violence. At one San Diego public charter school, assaults on campus involving mostly black and Hispanic students occur almost daily. Similar tales of chaos and violence are playing out in school districts from Los Angeles to Oakland, where minority students know they now have free reign to threaten and hurt others. The worst consequence they may have to face is a meeting with a “restorative justice” counselor.”
In the story, Alger doesn’t name the San Diego charter school, but told me through an Independent Institute spokesman she was referring to Lincoln High School.
First, Lincoln isn’t a charter school – it’s a traditional public school. So that’s a strike.
But putting that error aside, Alger passed along a few articles to support her claim that assaults occur at Lincoln on a near-daily basis.
One of those was a story from KPBS about rising crime at San Diego schools. A former principal was quoted as saying that drugs, violence and gang activity were constant threats at Lincoln High. That story, however, was published in 2010.
An editorial from Investor’s Business Daily claimed that Minnesota was adopting race-based discipline policies that looked a lot like state-sanctioned reverse racism. Here’s how Lincoln was depicted in that story:
Take San Diego. Just weeks after adopting similar racial discipline quotas, San Diego public schools have witnessed an explosion of violent assaults.
At its premier charter school, Lincoln High, students report daily fights now, mostly involving black kids. In the past month, there have been several arrests, including one involving a butcher knife, according to local reports. Victims have been hauled off by ambulance.
Again with the charter school claim.
Alger shared one more story, an Oct. 4 piece from Channel 10: “Student: Daily fights at Lincoln High School have created atmosphere of fear.”
The claim that assaults happen every day was attributed to one Lincoln sophomore, identified only by first name, whose face wasn’t shown on camera.
None of the three stories Alger shared with me to defend her claim included any actual statistics about assaults or fights happening daily at Lincoln High. Anecdotes are one thing, but for Alger’s claim about near daily assaults to be true, the numbers should support it.
I asked the school district for data on assaults recorded at Lincoln so far this school year. As of Dec. 17, there were 16 batteries and no assaults, the two categories the district generally uses for fights.
Sixteen cases of battery is a concern and worthy of exploration, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to the claim that assaults occur on a near daily basis. Alger’s story was published Dec. 3. By then, there had been about 60 days of school, meaning that, at most, fights at Lincoln happen roughly every four days.
Even if you allow for fights Lincoln staff might have not been heard about or ones that happened off campus, the official number isn’t close enough to back Alger’s claim.
In this case, a national outlet seized on a narrative about a troubled school, and Lincoln was held out as a cautionary tale of what could go wrong when a district tries to recalibrate its approach to discipline.
The problem was, Alger’s facts weren’t sound. She claimed assaults happened “almost daily” at a school later determined to be Lincoln High. They don’t. That makes her claim false.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The U.S. Department of Education recently released data that showed there were more than 1.2 million homeless students enrolled in public schools last year, the highest ever.
As the nation’s educators continue to struggle with the problem, the “NewsHour's" April Brown tells the story of one Washington, D.C., teenager who defied the odds and may well inspire other kids in similar situations.
This story is another in our American Graduate series funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
APRIL BROWN (NewsHour): In many ways, Rashema Melson is a typical Georgetown University freshman. She graduated top of her high school class last year and now makes it a point to come early every day, so she can sit in the front row.
But Rashema’s path toward success has not been an easy one. Her father was killed when she was 7 months old, and she spent much of the last three years in a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter with her mother and two brothers, facts that she kept mostly secret while in high school.
RASHEMA MELSON, Georgetown University: It was nobody’s business. And if it was, I didn’t want to be pitied, I didn’t want to be looked down upon as if I couldn’t do it, because I’m a strong person.
CHISA PERRY, Anacostia High School: She was always smiling, very bubbly, very friendly, always the good morning or the hello.
APRIL BROWN: One person she eventually told was Anacostia High School teacher Chisa Perry, who was Rashema’s track and field coach. But for a long time, Perry didn’t know. And she says, regardless of what was happening at home, Rashema always remained upbeat and focused at school.
CHISA PERRY: The best way to describe Rashema would be determined. Anything she sets her mind to do, she will do it.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): As the fall football season heats up, the Friday night lights dimmed somewhat last week with news that three young players died from injuries sustained on the field.
Tom Cutinella, a 16-year-old, collapsed following a blocking collision during a game in Elwood, New York; 17-year-old Demario Harris Jr. was pronounced dead three days after collapsing during a game. He’s believed to have suffered a brain aneurysm shortly after making a tackle. That same night, 17-year-old Isaiah Langston collapsed during a warmup before playing for Rolesville High School in North Carolina.
Our Student Reporting Labs train young people in public media journalism. They went to the football team at T.C. Williams High School in Virginia, which happens to include a female kicker, for reaction.
MAHLIQUE BOOTH: I like contact. I love hitting.
ZACHARY EISENHOUR: I love hitting in football. That’s one of the things that makes football great.
STUDENT: I like the contact. That’s what it is.
RAYJON JONES: When I had that first contact with someone, then like I felt like I had enough power to do what I want.
BRIANNA SMITH: When I did kickoff last year, I obviously knew that I could be tackled. And then when it actually happened one time, I was completely shocked, because I didn’t know what it was really going to feel like.
DENNIS RANDOLPH, Football Coach, T.C. Williams High School: Coaches, again, we talk about this in our meetings. We did early. And sometimes we have kind of neglected it in the past, but please make sure that, because of these three deaths related to football — OK, and that’s most in a long period of time — with all the safety that is taking place now, we play a game. We want to have fun.
But we also want to make it safe. We want you to play hard, we want you to hit hard, we want you to go after your opponent, tackle him, knock him to the ground if you are blocking him, but we want you to be safe about it. We don’t want — we’re not saying kill the other player, because that’s not appropriate.
Fortunately, I have never have worked with a kid who died. Those kind of things are tragic. And certainly it affects us because I work with kids every day, and I really don’t know how I would react to one of my players getting hit and dying from an injury related to the sport that I — has been a part of my life my whole life.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): It’s high school graduation season, and one of the country’s largest school districts is celebrating the accomplishments of dozens of students who’ve had a particularly difficult time earning a diploma.
They have all been homeless, which drastically increases the likelihood of their dropping out.
But as David Nazar of PBS SoCal explains, a concerted effort to help those students graduate has been paying off.
It’s the latest report for our American Graduate project, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
DAVID NAZAR, PBS SoCal: Nora Perez just graduated from Roybal learning center, a high school in Los Angeles. Those four years can be an uphill battle for many students. However, Nora faced a mountain of challenges. This is what she called home during high school, the back of a car, parked on a city street. It’s where Nora spent part of the night and studied after school.
NORA PEREZ: You don’t have your own room. You don’t have your own bed. You don’t even know where to shower. And it was really difficult. It was really difficult.
And it brings tears to my eye, because going through all this pain, going through all those moments, all those cold nights that I looked at my parents and saw the pain in their face.
DAVID NAZAR: The difficult road for Nora began during her freshman year. Her father lost his job, and then the family lost its house.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Little Black Pearl Academy, a public school on the South Side of Chicago, is trying to write a new songbook for success. It started last fall, when the school’s founder, Monica Haslip, transformed her after-school art center into a full-time public school focused on the arts.
Her students come from some of the highest-crime areas in the city. The undertaking was born from frustration.
MONICA HASLIP, Founder, Little Black Pearl Academy: My biggest motivation for this school was about looking at the volume and the number of children that we have in Chicago that are dropping out of school.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Haslip partnered with Chicago public schools to identify students on the wrong track.
MONICA HASLIP: A lot of our students that we have had had really poor attendance prior to coming here, so we believe and we have been able to see that by offering them access to the arts, that in itself is the thing that is inviting them to come to school every day.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The hope is that art can offer students, who may be distracted or even traumatized by violence that surrounds them, a way to return to learning.
Why art? Why is this the reason that they should come?
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Some good news to report today from the world of public education:
For the first time in recent years, American high schools have cracked a milestone on graduation rates, reaching 80 percent.
Jeffrey Brown has the story, as part of our American Graduate project, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): In fact, 81 percent of American high schools graduated on time in 2012. That is up from 73 percent six years earlier. The report is based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Education and was compiled by a coalition called America’s Promise Alliance.
Joining us now is John Bridgeland, president and CEO of Civic Enterprises, one member of that group, and he’s an author of today’s report. He has been adviser to the American Graduate project.
And welcome to you.
JOHN BRIDGELAND, Civic Enterprises: Thank you. Nice to be with you.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, what is driving the good news? What — how did we get there?
JOHN BRIDGELAND: Well, the significant gains in graduation rates have actually been among Hispanic students and African-Americans since 2006.
And these students, half of African-Americans and 40 percent of Hispanics, were trapped in these dropout factory schools, where it was literally a 50-50 proposition whether you graduated or not.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Our second education story is about a Brooklyn high school that has not yet graduated its first class, but it’s being closely watched for its approach to providing lower-income students with college tuition and the special skills to get a job — one of its distinct features, a lot more time in the classroom.
President Obama sang its praises again this week and announced two more schools like it will be opened.
Hari Sreenivasan has the story as part of our American Graduate project, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): When it comes to high school, should six years be the new four? It is a question that Cletus Andoh has times to think about every day as he rides New York City subway from his home in the Bronx to his school in Brooklyn, a journey that takes him an hour-and-a-half each way.
Cletus is a junior at Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH. P-TECH is a six-year public school where students like Cletus are expected to leave with a high school diploma and a two-year associate of applied science degree, basically finishing community college for free.
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HARI SREENIVASAN: Giving students from low-income families the chance at free college tuition was the brainchild of a public-private partnership developed by IBM, the New York City Education Department, and the City University of New York.
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HARI SREENIVASAN: IBM’s Stanley Litow, a former deputy schools chancellor for New York City, helped starts Brooklyn’s P-TECH in 2011, and has since overseen the creation of seven similar schools in New York and Chicago.
Students have longer school days, attend classes year-round, and get hands-on training in job skills that companies like IBM say their entry-level employees often lack.
SUMMARY: At Hinkley High School in Aurora, Colo., students, parents and administration are meeting face-to-face to resolve student conflict with conversation. The number of physical altercations has taken a nosedive as this new type of disciplinary action, called “restorative justice,” replaces suspension. Hari Sreenivasan has the story.
BONNIE MARTINEZ, Dean of Students, Hinkley High School: That (this approach), to some people, may be viewed as a soft discipline, especially if you look at the Western culture. You know, we’re about war and violence. We’re not about peace and harmony.
SUMMARY: In 1870, on the heels of civil war and the end of slavery, the nation's first African-American public high school opened just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Today Dunbar High School is honoring its past while hoping to recapture what once made it great. Jeffrey Brown talks to Alison Stewart about her new book, "First Class."
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): It's a school aiming for the future.
STEPHEN JACKSON, Principal, Dunbar High School: Good morning.
JEFFREY BROWN: When principal Stephen Jackson greeted students to Dunbar High in Washington, D.C., on a recent morning, it was to a brand-new $122 million dollar state-of-the-art building that boasts the latest in classroom and energy-saving technology.
It's one part of the city's effort to turn around a deeply troubled school system. Just blocks from the U.S. Capitol, Dunbar, on its former site next door, was known for low graduation rates, low test scores, and an often dangerous environment.
But the school, named for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, is also one with a glorious, historic past. That's now captured in a small museum in the new building and eagerly touted by principal Jackson to the outside world and to his students.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now our look at expanding access to the country's most prestigious universities. It's part of our focus on inequality in America.
Much attention has been paid lately to the issue of rising student debt and soaring college costs. But for some high-achieving students from lower-income families, the problem is even more acute. They rarely even apply to the nation's top schools.
Jeffrey Brown reports on efforts to change that.
MAN: In the way that Hobbes and Jefferson envisioned. Let's start with Hobbes.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Eight-thirty a.m. on a summer morning on the campus of Princeton University, and these high school students are already engaged in a rigorous discourse about political philosophy.
STUDENT: They're inherently kind of predisposed to competition.
MAN: OK. We're getting that. Good, we're getting there.
STUDENT: They become enemies because you can't both have that one thing that you want.
SUMMARY: Special correspondent for education John Merrow reports on what accounts for a national rise in high school graduation rates and why the increase has raised some questions about inflation in how schools report their data. He also explores new tactics educators are using to inspire students to succeed.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now to our series on dropouts and what educators are trying to get more high school students to graduate.
We have spent much time chronicling the problem and looking at different approaches that make a difference. There's been better news to report of late, but with graduation season coming soon, there are also questions about what's behind the numbers.
The NewsHour's special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has the story for our American Graduate project.
JOHN MERROW: It's graduation day for the high school class of 2012 at College Career Tech Academy in Pharr, Texas. Graduation rates have been rising here. In fact, according to a U.S. Department of Education report, they have been going up all across the country.
The latest data show the high school graduation rate has risen to 78.2 percent. That's a 5 percentage point jump in just four years after flatlining for almost 40 (years).
