By: Marc Steiner


photo by Leo Howard Lubow


Depending on whom you ask, the dropout problem in Baltimore City schools is either moderately bad or truly terrible. The school system claims an on-time graduation rate of 62.6 percent for 2008; a 2009 study from the nonprofit America’s Promise Alliance put the number at 41.5 percent—which ranks the city forty-sixth out of the fifty largest metropolitan school districts. Tellingly, the figure is also a whopping 39 points lower than the graduation rate in the neighboring suburbs.

So let’s say that about half of the kids who enter high school in Baltimore City—as in most other major U.S. cities—fail to graduate. And the moment a teenager stops being a problem for the city schools, he or she starts being a problem for the rest of us.

That’s the message of Robert Balfanz, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Social Organization of Schools (CSOS). His work focuses not only on why students turn their backs on school, but also on what schools and communities can do about it. As the associate director for the Talent Development Middle and High School Project, he and his fellow researchers worked to translate their findings into a model for facilities that hold on to their students through the perilous passage from the middle grades to high school. Run in partnership with Hopkins, the Talent Development High School in Harlem Park opened in 2004 as the first new school built from the ground up around the CSOS model, which involves intensive intervention and an emphasis on engaging students in the act of learning. In 2008, TDHS graduated 84 percent of its first senior class. “We have to remember that, yes, we have to develop skills, but we also have to develop passion and desire,” Balfanz says. “The crazy thing is we all know from personal experience, when we actually learn something we care about, that’s a joyful, exciting thing.”



Q We tend to think of truancy and dropouts as school problems, but your research seems to approach them from a larger social context.

A Essentially, what we came to realize is that they are community problems—it’s the community that bears the cost of the dropout crisis. When kids drop out of school, they stay in the community. What that means is we have large numbers of 18- to 24-year-olds who are simply idle—officially idle. In reality, they find other things to do.


Q Why has it been so difficult to put our hands around the actual numbers of kids involved?

A The challenge is that kids don’t walk into the principal’s office and say, “I’ve had enough; I’m out of here.” They just stop showing up. The schools don’t know what happened to them. The famous term used in many statistics is “whereabouts unknown.” It was assumed that if your whereabouts were unknown, we didn’t have to count you as a dropout. [Schools] didn’t feel they had a solution, and they felt a lot of pressure to raise achievement scores, so there was sort of a gentlemen’s agreement to minimize the problem.


Q How many children are affected by this in the United States?

A The estimate is about 1.2 million kids drop out every year. A friend of mine, the former governor of West Virginia [Bob Wise, currently president of the Alliance for Excellent Education], argues that if we heard on the news that three thousand kids disappeared today, we’d be up in arms. It’d be a national crisis. But that many kids do disappear every day, quietly and unnoticed.


Q Is it because when we think of dropout kids, they’re likely to be older and therefore less sympathetic?

A You’re right. This isn’t the bright-eyed 5-year-olds; it’s the surly-looking teenagers. So it’s much more easy to say, “If you don’t want to graduate from high school, how can I make you?” That leads to this sense that no one’s responsible, that no one can make a difference.

In fact, when you talk to dropouts, they almost instantly regret it. Many try to come back. And they often will say, “If only one adult had just said ‘Don’t go,’ I would’ve stayed in school.”

Many people might assume that these are all wild kids who are looking for their freedom outside the doors of the school. Or kids that get pregnant. Or kids that have to work to support their families. That’s all true, but it’s a small percentage. We routinely have half or more of our kids—for decades—dropping out of school in certain communities. That’s not a problem—that’s a crisis.

What we found is that the schools aren’t helping these kids succeed. Very few kids drop out right away. They miss a few days of school, they fail a course, they don’t earn enough credits to get promoted. Then they try to repeat the grade, but it’s the same scenario. Then maybe there’s a short stay at an alternative school. And then they’re gone. It’s a very predictable process. As early as the sixth grade, kids are actually raising their hands and waving, saying, “Help.” And we either haven’t chosen to pay attention or we haven’t known the signals to look for.


Q You’ve written that “this year’s dropout is last year’s truant.”

A What typically happens is after you first skip a few days of school, you learn nothing happens: No one says, “Where were you?” So you skip a few more days. Eventually, you have one foot in, one foot out. In the meantime, school’s going on, so now you’re going to fail everything and repeat the grade. And then you just don’t come back after the summer. It’s really important to pay attention to chronic absenteeism; that’s the canary in the coal mine.


Q How can a school system address that?

A What you’re trying to do is to create smaller personalized environments for kids, where you don’t have this enormous number of needy kids and a limited number of adults that don’t want to be there. In Baltimore, you can clearly see from the data that our large middle schools were essentially educational agents of destruction. You can debate what the better design is, but the thousand-student middle school was just about the worst design.


Q Tell me about these so-called “transformation schools.”

A The idea is to open twenty-four new [grade] 6–12 schools [by 2011] that have about seventy-five kids per grade, as opposed to three hundred in a big middle school. It’s a much more manageable number of kids. They also take them right when kids are making these independent decisions and get them all the way through to graduation in one place.

When you’re in elementary school, you go because your mom pushes you out the door—you do what you’re told. When you turn 11 or 12 or 13 years old, you make an independent decision to be engaged in school. Students that age also have the wherewithal [to leave school], and it’s enabled in a big city by mass transportation. In the suburbs, the yellow bus picks you up at your front door and drops you off in front of the school building. There’s no escape. Starting in middle school, most cities rely on mass transportation. This gives kids life skills—not many suburban kids could do three bus transfers by themselves at 12. But it also provides opportunity. In the city, out the back door, on the MTA, and you’re—


Q Wherever you want to be.

A Wherever you want to be. We have to recognize that there’s a huge middle-grade need for adventure and camaraderie. And if we don’t supply that in schools, kids will find it outside of school.


Q Let’s talk about some of the prevention steps you recommend. One is don’t expel primary school students.

A You would think that would be the biggest no-brainer. Yet in some places, it’s a growing trend. You know, “We can’t handle your behavioral outbursts, go somewhere else.”


Q So what does the school do? You have a lot of very angry, frustrated young children in inner-city schools.

A This is where the community has got to step in. We can’t say, “Too bad—deal with it.” We have to invest community and external resources to provide the social worker, the family intervention, and the more structured learning environments to get that child to be able to socialize within the norms of school.


Q You’ve said it’s vital that kids be promoted on time to the tenth grade, but also that we shouldn’t have social promotions.

A That means really intensive, until-it-works, right-away intervention. With sixth-graders, we don’t wait to see if they grow out of it. We give them after-school, Saturday school, summer school, tutors, mentors. We keep increasing the intensity until they’re back on track. That’s the only way around the dilemma.

By the same token, if you hold them back a grade, we know that there’s no one angrier—and almost no one with lower odds of graduating—than an overage eighth grader. If you’re 16 and in middle school, all you see is a bunch of babies. Until we get you out of that, you’re not going to pay attention to anything because you’re just angry.


Q In one of your papers, you say that for every hundred sixth graders who fail math or English, only 11 percent graduate on time, and only 27 percent graduate within two years.

A It’s one of those things that flabbergasts you. Why would just failing math when you’re 12 be the end of your educational career? But think about it: It takes a lot to fail in the sixth grade. Middle-school teachers are forgiving. If you’re failing sixth-grade math, you’re getting, like, zeroes on all your tests, which means you really are behind multiple years. Or you’re either acting out or missing lots of school. And, without intervention, what’s going to change that?

What’s happened is we want to believe that they’ll grow out of it. We all have family stories of people in early adolescence being really off the hook at 12. Maybe we got them a tutor; maybe we took them to a psychologist. High-poverty neighborhoods don’t have those resources. Their resource is the school. If the school doesn’t have a solution, there isn’t a solution.

We’ve done these studies in about ten cities, so it’s not just one bad city, one bad year. One in four kids that struggle in the sixth grade will graduate. In Philadelphia, we were able to cross-reference school records with social service and juvenile justice records. Two-thirds of the males that got arrested in the ninth grade and two-thirds of the females that got pregnant in high school had a sixth-grade off-track indicator. So it’s not only essential for their lives that we intervene and get this right—it’s essential for the community. This is the engine of the underclass.




  On the air: Listen to a podcast of the full interview at www.steinershow.org.


Supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute-Baltimore





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