Interview with Doug Pratt of the MEA on the Public Hearings "Dropouts: One is Too Many"
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals who are passionate about the future of Michigan Education. Now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we are joined in the Foxbright Podcast Studio by Doug Pratt. Doug is the Director of Communications with Michigan Education Association, and he has just finished the first of what will be ten public hearings, seeking ways to fix, what the MEA is describing as "Michigan's dropout crisis".
Welcome Doug, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.
Doug Pratt: It's a pleasure to be on with you.
Rob Huisingh: Doug, I always like to have people tell us a little bit about themselves when they get on the show, take a few minutes and tell us who you are, and what is it that you do with the MEA.
Doug Pratt: Sure. My name is Doug Pratt, I am the Communications Director for the MEA. The MEA is a union here in Michigan for public school employees. We represent about 160,000 employees across the state.
My job as Director of Communications is to talk with the public and with our members about all the various issues going on in education today, here in the state and across the country. One of the key issues we're facing right now is the dropout crisis. By some estimates, as many as 20,000 Michigan students drop out of school every year. Setting aside the fact that that has long-term negative impacts on those students' lives, there is a financial impact to the community, there is impact to the business community, to taxpayers, to law enforcement. We need to address and establish the breadth of the problem that we are facing, and come up with realistic solutions that deal with that broad spectrum of problems.
Rob Huisingh: Now, I attended the hearing today in Grand Rapids and found it to be very insightful. We heard from many different organizations talking about efforts that they are taking to address the dropout issue. For those people that haven't attended this hearing, can you tell our listeners a little bit about what to expect, and even what to expect in terms of request for people that would like to present.
Doug Pratt: Sure. Well, just to get this upfront, more information about when the other nine hearings are going to be held is on our website at www.mea.org/dropouts. What we are doing is, we have nine hearings remaining across the state. Our goal is to bring in input from that broader community that is impacted by the dropout crisis. We need to hear from the business community. We need to hear from law enforcement. We need to hear from parents. We need to hear from educators, and most of all, we need to hear from young people, from our students; who either have dropped out and who have come back, or who have resisted the urge to drop out and have stayed in school, or frankly others who have dropped out and have not come back, and talking about their experiences. We need to get the full picture here in order to solve this problem.
What we are trying to do is pull in people from that broader community, have them testify at these hearings, and then we are going to turn around, and in October, at a summit in Lansing, we are going to turn over all this testimony to the Governor and the Legislature to help them develop sound education policy, and figure out how to fix this problem.
One of the key things right now is, the solutions that are being talked about in Lansing are -- we are still looking for the silver bullet, looking for the quick fix, and this problem is far too complex for a quick fix. What we are talking about is raising the dropout age by two years or taking away driver's licenses from dropouts. Those are punitive measures. They don't at the end of the day address the reasons why students are thinking about leaving school.
Rob Huisingh: I understand.
Doug Pratt: We need to get to the heart of that issue, and that's what these hearings are really all about.
Rob Huisingh: I was impressed as I listened to the people speak today, and that was students as well as educators, administrators, one of the things that I kept hearing over and over and over again was the importance of some significant, impactful, adult relationship, and that relationship piece seems to be key.
Doug Pratt: It's a huge factor in this. We know the three new Rs in education; Rigor, Relationships, and Relevance, are incredibly important to this, and Relationships are one that we talk about all the time. If students feel like they are being cared for. If students feel like they have a place within that school community. They are much less likely to drop out.
It also is critical in order to provide the Relevance. You can't make a rigorous high school curriculum, or rigorous curriculum at any level, relevant to a student, if you don't understand what that student's interest are. At the end of the day, this is all about this not being a one-size-fits-all approach. Every student learns differently, and we need to be able to capture that in the educational process. We need to be able to identify what those needs are, and work with that student. That takes smaller class sizes, that takes individual attention, that takes parental involvement. One of the key adult relationships that we talk about all the time is the need for parents to be involved in their child's education, and to develop a relationship between the parent and the teacher, and the other support employees who work in our public schools. It's all one large community, and working together in relationships is the best way to solve this problem.
Rob Huisingh: I certainly believe, at least from what I could tell, that truancy is one of the precursors to flat out dropping out, and I think that all of us can look into our own personal history to see that we all have probably experienced situations where attendance became lax, and after attendance became lax, we just flat out stopped going to organizations. So it's human nature. Right now there are punitive measures around truancy. I heard an awful lot today about interventions to address truancy as one of the precursors.
Doug Pratt: I think you have got interventions, but one of the key elements to having an intervention with an at-risk student is having a relationship. You have to know that student enough to know that they are on the brink, and they need to be pulled back. We need to be aggressive about that. I think that's something we are going to hear in all the hearings around the state is that we need to be very forthright with students about what their future would look like if they do drop out. We need to make sure that we are making this relevant, we are making them understand that despite all the pressures of society around them; be they economic, be they negative societal influences, we have to fight that, we have to make sure that we keep them, so that they understand -- say, there was a young lady at the hearing today who had a sister who had dropped out, who had had a child and she felt like she needed to leave school in order to help that family financially.
She chose to stay in school because she recognized that the long-term value for high school education and moving on with her education was more important than the short-term financial gains. She is an exceptional young lady. There are a lot of teenagers who don't necessarily see that far down the pipeline, and that's not surprising to any of us. We have to build the relationships with those students to keep them engaged, to keep them in relevant curriculum, to challenge them, but to not leave any of them behind.
Rob Huisingh: You represent hundreds of thousands of teachers. People that are on the front line, working day-to-day, trying to be impactful, trying to establish relationships. It certainly is welcomed that your organization is trying to attack this issue. If you look forward after these ten hearings, what's the outcome that you would love to see out of this?
Doug Pratt: Well, I think one thing that's important to know is, that it's not just the MEA that's involved in this, we have a lot of partner organizations that are working on this together. The ISDs, children's groups, Michigan's charter schools, all of us are working together. These are groups that aren't always on the same page on issues. We need to get past all that. This problem is bigger than that. This problem is important enough that we all need to work together to find that set of solutions. I think that's the outcome we are really after, is the set of solutions, and an environment in which Lansing can help local communities to address this problem. Right now our political system -- we look for the quick fix, and there is no quick fix here, and if nothing else comes out of this, the sentiment that there is a broad public understanding that it's going to take more than a quick fix, and that it's okay for the Legislature to challenge themselves to do something larger, it is a good thing. It's okay at the local level in our communities for us to try to deal with the multiple factors that are involved in solving the dropout crisis.
Our mantra in all of this is that one dropout is too many. We know at the end of the day, this isn't the world of absolutes, we are never going to 100% stop the dropouts, but we need to make sure that we minimize this. We need to make sure that we graduate as many students as we can to fill jobs in our new economy. It's critical because -- and again, not only for those students and their individual careers going forward, but to society.
There is a study out of Columbia University that says, for each new graduate, taxpayers save $127,000, in increased tax revenue, in reduced cost in public health, criminal justice, welfare payments, human services, the whole spectrum. If you just take that $127,000 and multiply it by the approximately 20,000, that some estimates say we lose, that's $2.5 billion to our societal cost on this. That's immense. Just think, if we could graduate more and reinvest those kind of savings back into education, the kind of system that we could have, the kind of health care we could have. This could really address a lot of problems. But at the end of the day, we have to create the environment where this complex solution can be put into place, and we identify the problems that we have to solve. That's what these hearings are all about, and that's why all of these partners are coming together to have these conversations, and bring in public testimony in these ten communities around the state.
Rob Huisingh: I recently had the opportunity to go through a manufacturing facility, a truly exceptional manufacturing facility. The President of the company said that, in many cases, going through the process for their strategic planning, and it wasn't necessarily the plan that was important, it was the planning that was important. That occurred to me today as I was seeing everyone rally together and we heard great news coming out of the Kent School Services Network, as far as things that they were doing about bringing services, cohesive services, right into the schools, and many other truly wonderful organizations, having an impact, including charter schools, and it just felt to me like we raised the awareness bar today.
Doug Pratt: That's really what we are after. We need to get our hands around the scope of this problem. It's not easy for us to realize because -- and actually there was a speaker at the hearing today, who I really appreciated the passion she spoke with. She talked about how just listening to this conversation could make you think that we don't have a problem, and we all know that's not the case. We all know that for every success story that we can pick out and highlight, that there are countless, countless students who fall through the cracks, and we have to fill in those cracks. We can't let them fall through, for their own sakes and for our society's sake.
Rob Huisingh: Great. Doug, have we adequately determined the scope of the problem here in Michigan?
Doug Pratt: It's one of the issues that we hope to address through the hearings. We have trouble even just assessing the number of dropouts in the first place. There are lots of different ways that you could calculate dropouts. A lot of times what you see is, you take the number of students who enroll day one of freshman year, and compare that to the number of students who graduate four years later. Now, on face that sounds logical, but you have to take into account that you lose students through schools of choice, you lose students through other educational options, you lose students through parents who have lost their jobs, left the state. There are a variety of reasons why a student may not be in that count on that last day of that fourth year. Not to mention the fact that there are some students that take longer than four years to complete the rigorous curriculum that we are setting up here in Michigan.
We need to be able to figure out the numbers we are dealing with. We know that there is a dropout problem. We know that even if you take some of the biased numbers that are out there, saying districts have 25% graduation rate; we know that's not the case. We know there are other reasons why that number is there, but is the significant chunk of that dropouts? Sure. Is one in that number too many? You bet it is. So we need to address that. We need to address the numbers problem. But we also need to address the other problems, the non-statistical issues that are out there. We need to know what impact this has on local businesses, and their ability to hire. We need to know the impact on law enforcement. We need to know the impact on the human services sector, and that's why the group of people who have come together to conduct these hearings have come together.
You don't know the kinds of stories that can come out until we get these people together and start talking. One of the conversations we have had thus far was interesting. We were talking to -- it was a Home Builders Association, and they were talking about how they have trouble with high school graduates coming out not knowing enough geometry to be able to do apprenticeship programs to build homes. I think we can all agree, we want students, we want apprentices, we want our carpenters, to know the geometry to build a good sturdy house, and we have got the vocational training programs to do that. You can take and teach geometry in a way that's applicable for those kinds of things.
Again, this is no one-size-fits-all approach. There are going to be students who are going to go on, take those math courses, and go on to college to become a Physicist or a Certified Public Accountant, and there are students who are going to take those math classes and go on to become carpenters, to use those skills in the positions we need in our economy to make our economy work and to make our society work. So it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. We have to continue to find ways to raise the bar and challenge all students, but not leave any of them behind. We need to make sure that we are graduating students to fill 21st century jobs, and that doesn't just mean high-tech, Google type jobs, it means jobs that no longer require some of the skills that they did 20-30 years ago. A lot more stuff is based on technology now. There is a lot more science involved in some of these things. So we need to push the envelope, but we need to push the envelope within a context that makes sense, and that's why college prep programs are so important, and that's why vocational and technical training programs are so important.
Rob Huisingh: Doug, I just want to thank you for taking the time to be on our show, and for putting up with me, with my bad case of laryngitis.
Doug Pratt: It's my pleasure.
Rob Huisingh: I hope you will come back and join us again. If you would like to contact Doug Pratt at the Michigan Education Association, he can be reached by telephone at (800) 292-1934, Ext. 5566. Again, that telephone number is (800) 292-1934, Ext. 5566. As he said earlier, you can also visit the MEA online at www.mea.org.
Also, if you would like to hear when the next nine hearings are going to be, again, you can go to their website at www.mea.org/dropouts. Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh, hopefully with a better voice, with Inside Michigan Education.
Announcer: This has been the Inside Michigan Education Podcast; comments are welcome through our website at www.insidemieducation.com, or by email to feedback@insidemieducation.com. We hope you have enjoyed the show.