It isn’t easy to be a comeback kid in education

By DOROTHY RICH

MCCLATCHEY-TRIBUNE

It can be harder to be a comeback kid in education than it is in politics. Ask any student who feels discouraged mid-school year — the very time we are in now. Check the dropout rates from high school. They provide evidence that coming back is not easy.

Political candidates can get a better shake in a new debate or a new primary state than a child with a report card or test scores that proclaim, “Failure, failure, failure.”

This is the hardest part of the school year, for teachers as well as students.

It’s a long haul between Christmas and spring break. Students who get poor grades on their report cards feel discouraged. And tests tend to focus on student deficits rather than strengths.

Each of us needs to know how to keep ourselves encouraged. Politicians know about this. Students need to know, too. Education is a zig-zag process. It’s not a ladder straight added up, even though grades K-12 make it look as if it is.

Going backward

Some days we seem to go backward. Our children need to be ready to handle disappointments. They need to be able to say, “I can do it,” even on down days. They need to talk to themselves — to get up after falling down. Middle and high school students can learn to ask themselves:

What keeps me up, more “resilient”?

How do I hold onto these feelings?

What drags me down, makes me less “resilient”?

How can I work to overcome this?

What small changes can I make that can result in big differences at school?

Students carry a lot of baggage from grade to grade. As a teacher, I never looked back at my students’ records from the previous year. I believe that every year is a chance to start over with a new teacher. New students deserve new starts. I wanted to be a teacher who brings out the best in each student, no matter what has happened in school before.

We say to our children (or at least I hope we do), “Work hard.” Yet, are we really sure in this country how hard we want our kids to work?

A new film, “Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination,” produced for the election year, presents statistics about how much time children spend in high school. China is listed at 583,200 minutes; India at 422,400 minutes and the United States at 302,400 minutes. Clearly, for the children in these other countries who do get to high school (far, far fewer than in the United States), high school demands a lot more time.

Bus schedules

In the United States, school schedules are dependent on bus schedules. Students come and go depending on when buses are available. That means that many of our high schoolers are in school before 8 a.m. and out by 1 p.m. It will take a lot more community will and resources to put more minutes into our school days. It’s an issue every political candidate needs to take on.

College, as one of my T-shirts says, starts in kindergarten, but so does dropping out. One of my fondest wishes for educational improvement is that for every child, there is a new day, even a longer day, a teacher who knows how to encourage, a parent who connects with the school, a report card that tells the truth, but is broad enough to identify strengths as well as weaknesses, so that every child keeps going to become a comeback kid.

X Dorothy Rich is founder and president of the nonprofit Home and School Institute, MegaSkills Education Center in Washington. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.