Turning Around Southbridge Schools

Ken O’Brien

“Across the United States, approximately 1,235 high schools serving 1.1 million students—only 5 percent of the nation’s high schools—have graduation rates at or below 67 percent. While the high school graduation rate recently reached 81 percent in 2013, the number of chronically failing high schools remains much too high. Among this group of failing public high schools, approximately 7 percent of students—who are overwhelmingly low-income students of color—are attending schools where it is not likely that they will go on to college or career.”

So reported the Center for American Progress in Dramatic Action, Dramatic Improvement: The Research on School Turnaround issued at the end of last month.

On January 27 of this year, in an article titled “Graduation rates up, dropouts decline”, the Worcester Telegram reported that Southbridge had a dropout rate of 69.9%, just missing the cutoff referenced above. 

New Study: Kids Say School Is Too Easy

Ken O’Brien

According to a new study out today from the Center for American Progress, which picked over three years of data collected by the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, 37 percent of fourth-graders say their math work is “often” or “always” too easy, 57 percent of eighth-graders says the same about their history work, and 39 percent of seniors say they rarely have to write papers on what they read about in class.

Almost a third of eight-graders say they read less than five pages a day, and are only required to write long answers on reading tests twice a year or less.