As a consequence of the pandemic, many students are facing difficulties earning sufficient credits and good grades sufficient enough to graduate. This is a helpful read on what different states are doing.
I'm not sure how I feel about a 13th year of schooling since this could feel like a demotion for high school students. Volumes of research on grade retention should give us pause, especially since it coalesces around the best option of not retaining youth, but rather promoting them with resources. How about a stipend to attend a local community college and make that, in effect, their thirteenth year.
One could argue that this would encourage some students not to graduate so that they can get financial support to go to college, so this could get counter-balanced with other proposals incentivizing high school graduation.
How about, for example, allowing students to graduate early should they choose coupled with stipends for early graduates? The mix of options as covered in this piece opens up a rethinking of high school in imaginative ways.
For example, the idea of states moving more toward mastery- as opposed to seat-time based credit sounds promising for the long-term goal of academic recovery.
Student portfolios and "allowing students to get credit for multiple content areas from the same course" as Ohio is currently pursuing is innovative and makes sense. Here's a link to the state law that goes into effect in January, 2023: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3313.603
One can certainly bet that Ohio's approach will feel more fair with students as opposed to any new ways our policy makers might devise to retain youth in grade.
What needs to factor in the mix is that the pandemic didn't shut down students brains and they learned tons, like we all did, about the world, life, and their place in it. Many of us are already looking back and realizing just how much we learned about ourselves, our families, and values in the process. Acquiring a sense of what really matters, albeit frequently mediated through trauma, is nevertheless extraordinarily valuable. They just didn't quite learn all that schools taught. But they did learn. These were perhaps the most valuable, important lessons of their lives and that should count for something.
What the authors describe at the moment as a "long recovery" to dramatically lower graduation rates arguably holds possibility for constructive systemic change in the long run. All is not lost. We can and should be hopeful even as we collectively work to enact positive systemic change that works for teachers and teacher's work, as well.
-Angela Valenzuela
Low-income students and those with disabilities have been the hardest hit, with year-to-year declines for low-income students in 33 states and for students with disabilities in 22 states—more than twice as many as for the class of 2020, according to an analysis of state data by the EdWeek Research Center. The ongoing pandemic disruptions are rolling back years—and in some cases, a decade—of states’ progress in boosting graduation rates for students of color.
(A nationwide graduation rate total is not yet available. Though states are required to report disaggregated graduation rates to the federal government every year, many are behind, and full national data are not expected until next year. Not every state provided Education Week with data for all student groups in every year.)
Remote learning and repeated outbreaks and quarantines have led more students to miss school and fall behind in classes, while increased family illnesses and economic instability have given older students more reasons to leave school and start work early, according to Terri Martinez-McGraw, the co-director of the National Center for School Engagement, which studies and works with schools to prevent students from dropping out. At the same time, overwhelmed teachers and school staff have had less time and energy to track down students who are slipping through the cracks.
In the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, “kids have had a much longer time to be absent, fail classes and lose credits, have behavior problems,” said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. “High schools tend to be pretty mechanical [in response]: You fail a class, you don’t get credits; you don’t have enough credits, you don’t get a diploma. So we are seeing the first downward trends in graduation rates in 15 years in 2021, and there’s a good chance that continues … because we know kids just still aren’t back.”
Graduation rate declines have accelerated in many states as the pandemic continued. An analysis of state data by the EdWeek Research Center finds 31 states saw drops in graduation rates for the class of 2021, compared to 14 for the class of 2020.
The number of states that saw declining graduation rates for students with disabilities and low-income students more than doubled from 2020 to 2021.
Graduation-rate progress held steady for the class of 2020, whose members had mostly completed their requirements by the time the pandemic began to shutter schools in March 2020. States and districts also offered broad flexibility to students in meeting credit hours and seat time, course and testing requirements, and other graduation requirements.
The graduation flexibility states provided in 2020 “held students harmless” for academic disruptions, but they also may have given educators a false sense of security with regard to high school students’ progress, Balfanz said. State flexibility was intended to be temporary, but students in the subsequent high school classes became more disengaged, not less.
“In Arizona, we’ve lost 10 years of attainment; there’s been such a huge slide,” said Stephanie Parra, the executive director of ALL in Education, an Arizona nonprofit that works with districts to improve graduation rates. “We are going into the third school year still navigating a pandemic, and now we do have clear data that schools are struggling and our students are definitely going to need a lot of support to bring them back.”
The Grand Canyon state saw the biggest graduation declines in the nation. It graduated only 75.7 percent of its students on time in 2020-21, less than it has at any time since the state began calculating four-year cohort data in 2011. The decline has hit students of color particularly hard; graduation rates have dropped 5 percentage points for Black students, 4 percentage points for Hispanic students and nearly 6 percent for Native American students since 2018-19. The state board of education also has found rising student mobility among schools since the pandemic.
Across states that provided data, Asian students were the only group for which fewer states saw declines in graduation rates in 2021 than in 2020. In the same time, graduation rates have declined for Native American, Latino, and white students in the majority of states, and for Black students in 24 states.
More states saw drops in graduation rates for students of every race except Asian students in 2021 compared to 2020, according to an analysis of state data by the EdWeek Research Center. Below, see a breakdown of which states and demographic groups lost the most students.
A picture does say a thousand words. I like how Umair Haque breaks this down. This idea—or even actual possibility—of selling out the country is all pretty terrifying. If this doesn't send shivers up and down your spine, you're not paying attention.
-Angela Valenzuela
By now, you’ve seen the photo. Classified documents — some marked “Top Secret” — spread out on the floor of Donald Trump’s office, in his tacky beachfront estate. What the photo says is unmistakeable: the walls are closing in on Donald Trump.
Now, this story’s become incredibly convoluted. It’s getting tricky to follow. But I think it’d benefit us all to really understand it well. The best way to understand it, in fact, is the US Government’s affidavit about this so far, which makes it all incredibly clear. I’m going to quote directly from it (it’s compelling reading, and I highly recommend it in full):
Get all that? The Justice Department tells the story with crystal clarity. While it’s complicated, that’s mostly because of Trump’s backpedalling and trickery.
And what it all adds up to is damning.
After Trump said he’d turned over everything — surprise, surprise, for a pathological liar — he hadn’t. So when the FBI — getting wind of this — raided his estate, they found more than twice what he’d already turned over. 33 boxes, versus 15. All of which, according to the Justice Department, “calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”
Who’s writing those words? Federal prosecutors are. There are a few truisms in life. Things sane people don’t want to do. Die. Marry wrong. Go broke. And get on the bad side of the US government. Everyone from El Chapo to Al Capone learned that the hard way. Federal prosecutors are building a clear-cut, powerful case for…
For what, exactly? Well, this affidavit alone already uses terms like “obstruction.” There’s a lightweight set of charges here, along those lines — obstruction of justice, improper use of what’s US government property, lying to the government, and so forth. None of those are charges any sane person would want filed against them — I use the term lightweight relatively.
Because beneath those are a far, far different — and weightier by about ten thousand tons — set of charges. What might those be? Let me quote the affidavit again: “The Executive Branch’s review here also serves another compelling interest that was not at issue in Nixon: The records at issue include sensitive and highly classified documents. As the government has explained, the Intelligence Community, under the supervision of the Director of National Intelligence, is conducting a classification review of those documents and an assessment of the potential risk to national security that could result from their disclosure.”
The lightweight set of charges is about taking — is it fair to say stealing? — the documents. But the heavyweight set of charges is about the consequences to national security of stealing classified documents. Those are grave, grave charges. Unimaginable ones, really. Because now we’re in a twilight zone kind of situation — an American President, charged formally with jeopardizing America’s own national security?
It’s safe to say that the case isn’t there fully. Yet. There’s no evidence so far that Trump did anything improper with the documents…except keep them in his office and storage room, and claim they were his, not the government’s. Like, I don’t know, send screenshots of them to Kim Jong Un’s secret WhatsApp account. Like, who knows, share them on the Google Drive for the World’s Aspiring Autocrats and Dictators. Or maybe — here’s a crazy one — zap them up to an Instagram account only Trump and his best friend for life Vlad Putin share.
Nope. No evidence that the former President say, sold state secrets, trafficked classified documents, had a whole second career slash side hustle more commonly known as espionage.
Not a bit of evidence of that. Yet.
But the question then of course becomes: well, why else hang on to all these documents? You can safely make three bets right about now. One, no other former President has boxes of classified documents in a storeroom. Because, two, no other former President — whatever their sins — were anywhere close to as shady, sleazy, and compromised. That brings me to the big one, bet number three.
You can bet everything — the farm, the house, the savings, the kids, the dog — that those very same federal prosecutors are also asking the very same question right about now. Did the former President engage in…espionage? It sounds — cliché alert, how many times have we all said this over the last few years — the plot of a bad spy movie. And yet the evidence there already is is something beyond compelling — it’s incredibly disturbing.
What evidence is that? Well, we know, for example, that Russia wanted to elevate Trump to the office of President so badly that it was one of its highest national priorities. Hence, the GRU hacked Hillary’s emails — a fact which American media is still afraid to discuss — and sank her campaign, with a little help from useful idiots like James Comey. Meanwhile, Russia’s military agencies collaborated to install Trump into the office of President, for the explicit goal of sowing internal discord and collapsing America from within. This isn’t some kind of conspiracy theory, by the way — it’s all on the journalistic record.
So it’s not some kind of far-fetched wild-eyed kind of hysteria to wonder. We could all see it in plain sight, after all. Was that an American President…making googly eyes at Vladimir Putin? Palling around with Kim Jong Un? Acting like a besotted teenager the moment a dictator or fascist or tyrant walked into the room? Did he really just compliment them like he was trying to win them over? Why did he always act like they had something on him? Are there really — as its been rumored forever at this point — really The Tapes?
There’s a principle that applies to logic, and it was invented by an old monk. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is probably true — no matter how crazy or outlandish or unbelievable it seems. History’s proven what a powerful heuristic it really is. Were we…some kind of…divine creatures? No, man, we’re just walking apes, descended from bacteria. Wait, why do people get sick? Is it cosmic justice? The Three Fates, watching everyone, crones cutting the threads of life? Dude. It’s germs. They spread from you to me. Take a bath!
Even William of Occam, though, is turning over in his grave, boggle-eyed. Because rarely has his Razor been sharper than this. An American President…long rumored to be in league with every kind of sleazy dictator in the world…to be under their thumb…who openly despises democracy…installed with more than a little help from interference in American elections by a country that’s now making war in Europe…stealing box after box of classified documents… hiding them at home…and then not giving them back even when the government asked nicely…then didn’t ask nicely…and finally raided his house…to find even more than they ever imagined secreted away?
The story really is mind-melting.
You can bet that federal prosecutors are thinking exactly the same thing all of us are at exactly this moment. Well, all of us who aren’t Donald Trump’s cult, anyways. Did the former President sell out the country? Did he traffic those documents? Was it espionage?
I said three bets, but I lied. Let’s make it four. You can take it even further. And bet, in fact, that there’s a federal prosecutor or ten who’s practically drooling all over their Allen Edmonds loafers at making exactly that case. Please, they go to bed every night praying, let me have this one, God. Because if you were a federal prosecutor, well, making that case — prosecuting the former President the entire world hates with a passion, for selling out the country, for espionage? It’d be the political-legal equivalent of like suddenly becoming Mickey Mantle by way of the Terminator, and hitting a home run so hard that it flew over the nearest gulf, and went into the next state. It’d be not just the case of a lifetime, or even of the decade, not even the case of the century, but the gravest and greatest case in American history.
And if you won it? Well, you’d have the world at your feet, I imagine. You’d be a shoo-in for the next Presidential nomination, every law firm from here to Alpha Centauri would be begging you to let them put your name in big gold letters above their doors, Hollywood would come a-knocking faster than you can say “God, how did Netflix get so bad?” and every single publishing agent in Manhattan would faint every time you walked into the room.
Even if you lost the case, most of that would still be true. So you can bet, again, with utter surety, that every eager, square-jawed, stony-faced young federal prosecutor in all of Washington DC is asking the same question right now, if not for the sake of their country, decency, human civilization, or the right thing, then just for that of their career. And behind them? Are veritable legions in the FBI and so forth, who are asking exactly the same things — albeit, perhaps, for purer, nobler reasons.
The walls are closing in, my friends. There is little doubt at this point that federal prosecutors are out to get to the bottom of this. This ugly, sordid little man called Donald Trump. Who is he, really? First, he was New York’s laughingstock, the desperate wannabe. Then, he was President, by way of demagoguery. Then he was the leader of a neo-fascist movement, and after that, the instigator of a bloody coup. But you know and I know that we haven’t found the bottom of this pit in human form yet. More revelations are to come. And they’re likely to be even more explosive than these.
Who is Donald Trump, really? You’d think that sleazeball, laughingstock, demagogue, bully, fascist would be enough shame for most people in one lifetime. But Trump has no shame, and never did. So, therefore, he knows no bottom, either. It’s eminently possible that to that list will be added even more guttural levels of scandal and ugliness. Spy, traitor, criminal. Let your imagine run wild. Because that’s what everyone in Washington DC’s doing right about now, too. Asking questions — ones they’re not going to let go, until the truth emerges at last, and I suspect it’s going to be among history’s ugliest.
We’re going to find out who Donald Trump really was, all along. We both know, and we’ve always known, that, somehow, the truth of this man was going to be unspeakable, a quantum leap of sleaze beyond sordid, a whole new ballgame of despicable. And so if you think what we already know is bad — and it is — console yourself with this fact: my friend, the impossibly ugly truth of who Donald Trump really is may be exactly what we all suspected, all along. The walls are closing in. The endgame is afoot now. Napoleon, at least, had the isle of Elba. Trump? The way things are going now, he just might be remembered as the President who spent his last days in prison. Hey, don’t feel too bad for him. They have VCRs in there, I hear.
Umair
August 2022
