Students with Disabilities More Likely to Drop out of High School

By Frank Kineavy, DiversityInc

Students with disabilities are lagging behind their able-bodied peers when it comes to high school graduation. As the U.S. is on track to reach 90 percent graduation rates by 2020, students with disabilities only graduate at a rate of 61.9 percent, according to the 2015 Building a Grad Nation Report released by the America’s Promise Alliance.

This outlook is grim, especially considering that students with disabilities account for approximately 13 percent of all public school students nationwide. But since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 25 years ago, some steps have been taken in an attempt to increase graduation rates.

Read the story here.

U.S. Gets Poor Grades in Nurturing STEM Diversity

Education Week
By Erik W. Robelen
Published Online: March 22, 2010

The nation’s K-12 education system gets an average grade of D for the job it does “engaging and nurturing” minorities to pursue careers in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and a D-plus for such performance with girls, based on results released today from a survey of female and minority chemists and chemical engineers.
Those polled also believe science teachers play a larger role than parents and others in inspiring an interest in science, with 70 percent saying teachers have the most influence at the elementary level, and nearly 90 percent saying teachers have the most influence at the high school level.
Meanwhile, another report out today, developed with support from the National Science Foundation, pulls together “a large and diverse body” of existing research providing evidence that social and environmental factors contribute to the “underrepresentation” of women in science and engineering.
That study, from the Washington-based American Association of University Women, offers a set of recommendations for educators, parents, and others, including a call to “spread the word about girls’ and women’s achievements in math and science” to combat negative stereotypes; teach girls that intellectual skills are “acquired,” and not simply the product of “innate talent”; and explain to girls that buying into negative stereotypes can diminish academic achievement. It also says that in high school, girls should be encouraged to take classes in calculus, physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering when available.

Full Story: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/03/22/27stem.h29.html?tkn=NWVFcgAJIKVsbeYl2%2BToW1DL8nSEuQXi5ytU&cmp=clp-edweek

New Studies Highlight Needs of Boys in K-12, Higher Education

Science Daily
ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2010) — Boys face high rates of a variety of mental health issues, in addition to lagging behind girls in academic performance and college attendance, according to two new papers by University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Judith Kleinfeld.
The studies, recently published in the journal Gender Issues, note that boys have higher rates of suicide, conduct disorders, emotional disturbance, premature death and juvenile delinquency than their female peers, as well as lower grades, test scores and college attendance rates.
The first paper, "The State of American Boyhood," offers a status report on the academic, mental and social health of boys in the United States. Her conclusion: There is neither a "girl crisis" nor a "boy crisis."
"Rather, boys and girls suffer from different types of characteristic problems," Kleinfeld wrote, noting that girls have higher rates of depression, suicide attempts and eating disorders. "Schools need to pay attention to the difficulties of both girls and boys and bring these problems to the attention of families, teachers and mental health professionals."
Still, boys are in far more serious trouble, she argues. The gender gap in reading and writing at the end of high school, for example, is far wider than the gap in math and science ever was. More than a quarter of American male high school graduates can't understand a newspaper article, compared to about 10 percent of girls.

Full Story: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100126091733.htm

A Successful Plan for Racial Balance Now Finds Its Future Uncertain

New York Times
August 22, 2007
On Education
By JOSEPH BERGER
WHITE PLAINS

For 18 years, this city of 55,000 has maintained racially balanced schools without the white flight that has followed integration plans in places like Boston and Canarsie, Brooklyn.
But in June, the Supreme Court rejected school assignment plans in Louisville and Seattle that, like the one in White Plains, are also based explicitly on race. And there are fears that should a court turn down White Plains’s plan in the future, white families may abandon some of the neighborhood schools. That is not a fear restricted to White Plains, as dozens of other cities are having to reconsider similar plans.
“The demographics in some of the schools might change dramatically, and I don’t know how parents in those schools would feel about the demographics,” is the discreetly worded warning from Laurette Young, who administers the White Plains plan.
As in most cities, housing in White Plains, the Westchester County seat that has sprouted skyscrapers among its suburban patches, is identifiable by race. The southern end is dappled with tree-shaded homes inhabited mostly by white families, while the northwest has housing projects populated by black families and aging apartments crowded with Latinos.
Under a strict neighborhood zoning plan, children of those northwestern black and Hispanic families would be assigned to the Post Road School, but so would children from adjoining middle-class white enclaves, and it is not clear how many would attend if they were reduced to a tiny minority.
Conversely, school officials believe the south end’s Ridgeway School would be stripped of the ethnic palette that residents have long prized.
In 1989, White Plains, tired of perennially gerrymandering for racial balance, began a “controlled choice” plan that essentially jettisoned neighborhood zones and required each school to have the same proportions of blacks, Hispanics and “others,” a term that includes whites and Asians. The plan allowed for a discrepancy among schools of only 5 percent. Similar plans had been adopted in Cambridge and Fall River, Mass., and copied by Milwaukee, San Jose, Calif., and dozens of other cities.
White Plains’s plan takes pains to give parents genuine choices. In January and February, parents of entering kindergartners visit elementary schools and rank their top three picks. A family will get first choice, which 90 percent of families do, unless the number of applicants of that child’s race exceeds certain caps, which at a school with 100 kindergartners might be 13 blacks, 46 Hispanics, and 41 “others.”
Should that happen, a lottery is held for all students in that racial group, with assigned numbers on colored slips of paper picked out of a basket at a public meeting. Remaining kindergartners get second choice or, rarely, third.
Buses are provided for students living more than half a mile from school. The plan also balances assignments at the two campuses of the middle school.
As a result of the plan, enrollment at each elementary school is roughly 45 percent Hispanic, 17 percent black, and 37 percent other. Officials say the plan works because transparent rules are enforced without favoritism. No school is more overcrowded or receives more dollars. All groups share the burdens and benefits of integration, though the unspoken assumption is that white parents will send their children to public schools only up to a murky “tipping point.”
“Over the history of the plan, no school has emerged as most desirable or least desirable, so no racial group is disadvantaged by not getting into that school,” said Saul Yanofsky, a former superintendent who spearheaded efforts to draw up the plan.
While the plan would not work in many cities — either because they have too few whites or schools too geographically spread out — in White Plains it has, by most accounts, been a success. Although enrollment has grown to more than 7,000 largely as a result of a Latino influx, schools have retained roughly the same number, if not the proportions, of whites and blacks that they had in 1989. That is not the usual urban pattern.
Achievement levels in the schools are comparable. At Ridgeway, 76 percent of fourth graders passed the state’s English test in 2005; in Post Road, 67 percent did. At the end of the line, the high school, with 17 Advanced Placement courses, gets top graduates into Harvard and Yale.
[To see the entire article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/education/22education.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin ]