WHY KIDS ARE FAILING: FACULTY RESPONSES
1. Tamalyn Page *
I promised I would email you some concerns or ideas going through my head......
Dynamics of socio-economics have changed. We have many more students with issues that carry over into school than ever before!
In a building of 1800 students and failure rates coming out of our ears.....why do we not have at least two non-learning support paraeducators able to roam this building as needed--especially in fresh. and soph. wings? Funding......the district has to face our changing base here. No, we are not a title school but we still have a significant population that needs assistance.
Credit recovery--students say right straight up--I'll just do it in credit recovery. They don't have to put forth any effort during the year (giving them more free time), they can do a .50 credit in record time (and probably another one after that), and the big plus.......THEY ALWAYS GET A "B". And they don't mind summer school...go figure!
Attendance issues have increased dramatically! Marla sees 50 a week compared to maybe 10 or 15 in the past. At least a quarter of Skyview students have attendance issues. This doesn't include the "E" absences, especially the ones parents write notes for even when they know they aren't sick. Yeah, I know you cannot do anything about that one...but it certainly has an impact with students at risk.
Could the district please revisit the 15 minute rule? Late is late!! Period!
More and more incoming freshman just don't comprehend the credit system. If you fail you must make up the credit. They get all the way to end of soph. 1st semester before they grasp the idea. Failure has not held them back before--they don't think it will now!
2. Phil Hayes *
Some impressions I have formed since entering this field and this school last year is that there is an assumption that every student wants or needs to go to college. I do not believe this is true and I believe such constant messaging may be alienating some segment of the student population.
In my limited experience here I have met many students for whom the message is a big turn off and they don't see the point of high school.
I can speak from my experience in managing large scale organizational change projects at Hewlett Packard that one of the major obstacles to successful change was the failure to get employee buy-in. By this I mean we failed to help employees see themselves in the future picture of the post-change organization and this engendered resistance and even sabotage. I see similar issues with some of our students: if high school can be viewed as a "change process" then these students don't see themselves in the future design (via the college bound messaging).
Thus, one of the avenues of research I would be interested in pursuing is whether this hypothesis has any merit: is some of the lack of student achievement due to a perception that Skyview is only for the college bound?
I also know from my former experience that I had as much trouble finding skilled technicians for our automated factory as I did in finding degreed engineers. There are plenty of good paying career fields that do not require a four year degree (BTW, the average "four year college degree" now takes 6.3 calendar years to complete). Can/should we diversify our message to speak to the non-college bound?
3. Nancy Wistrand *
Did the same students who are failing now fail classes in middle school?
How are we connecting classes (subjects) with the students' lives? For example: how can they use their knowledge of chemistry if they are not planning a career that needs that info or are not planning on attending college?
How do we make education valuable to those failing students? Are all of the required classes truly of value to all students?
If a student fails the first semester of a year-long class like video production (a class that isn't specifically required for graduation), and that same student failed required classes first semester, why are we keeping that student in the video production class 2nd semester? Shouldn't that student be pulled & put into a credit recovery situation?
4. Bob Hofferber*
At the risk of sounding cranky, how much of it has to do with every student coming to school equipped with a cell phone, an IPod (complete with headphones to block out teacher instructions) a PSP in case they need a video-game fix, and most importantly the right to use these items whenever they feel the "need"?
Even the best teacher can't compete for attention with the kid in the back of the room sharing his IPod-stored porn with his friends :)
(End of maniacal ranting)
One other thing you may want to consider is surveying students as to how many of them have computers in their rooms, and how late they generally go to sleep. I'm a firm believer that the computer should be where mom and dad can keep an eye on things (My foster kids think of this as child abuse) Judging by what I see, a large percentage of students are struggling through in a sleep-deprived state, usually fueled by energy drinks and/or Starbucks.
4-14-08
It would be an interesting experiment to take a group of HS students and take away all their electronics, phones and computers at bedtime each night and to see how they perform compared to a control group. Actually someone has probably already done it, so I may have to do some searching to satisfy my curiosity- or at least be able to say "See, I was right" :)
Here is one link I found
www.apa.org/monitor/oct01/sleepteen.html
This is an older study, so when you add the internet in the bedroom to the equation it's undoubtedly worse. Maybe a survey asking students about how much sleep they get, how often they get online after bedtime etc. would be interesting.
Sleep deprivation may be undermining teen health
Lack of sufficient sleep--a rampant problem among teens--appears to put adolescents at risk for cognitive and emotional difficulties, poor school performance, accidents and psychopathology, research suggests.
BY SIRI CARPENTER
Monitor staff
On any given school day, teen-agers across the nation stumble out of bed and prepare for the day. For most, the alarm clock buzzes by 6:30 a.m., a scant seven hours after they went to bed. Many students board the school bus before 7 a.m. and are in class by 7:30.
In adults, such meager sleep allowances are known to affect day-to-day functioning in myriad ways. In adolescents, who are biologically driven to sleep longer and later than adults do, the effects of insufficient sleep are likely to be even more dramatic--so much so that some sleep experts contend that the nation's early high-school start times, increasingly common, are tantamount to abuse.
"Almost all teen-agers, as they reach puberty, become walking zombies because they are getting far too little sleep," comments Cornell University psychologist James B. Maas, PhD, one of the nation's leading sleep experts.
There can be little question that sleep deprivation has negative effects on adolescents. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for example, drowsiness and fatigue cause more than 100,000 traffic accidents each year--and young drivers are at the wheel in more than half of these crashes.
Insufficient sleep has also been shown to cause difficulties in school, including disciplinary problems, sleepiness in class and poor concentration.
"What good does it do to try to educate teen-agers so early in the morning?" asks Maas. "You can be giving the most stimulating, interesting lectures to sleep-deprived kids early in the morning or right after lunch, when they're at their sleepiest, and the overwhelming drive to sleep replaces any chance of alertness, cognition, memory or understanding."
Recent research has also revealed an association between sleep deprivation and poorer grades. In a 1998 survey of more than 3,000 high-school students, for example, psychologists Amy R. Wolfson, PhD, of the College of the Holy Cross, and Mary A. Carskadon, PhD, of Brown University Medical School, found that students who reported that they were getting C's, D's and F's in school obtained about 25 minutes less sleep and went to bed about 40 minutes later than students who reported they were getting A's and B's.
In August, researchers at the University of Minnesota reported the results of a study of more than 7,000 high-school students whose school district had switched in 1997 from a 7:15 a.m. start time to an 8:40 a.m. start time. Compared with students whose schools maintained earlier start times, students with later starts reported getting more sleep on school nights, being less sleepy during the day, getting slightly higher grades and experiencing fewer depressive feelings and behaviors.
Also troubling are findings that adolescent sleep difficulties are often associated with psychopathologies such as depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
This research, combined with studies showing widespread sleep deprivation among teens, has propelled efforts to educate children and adults about the importance of a good night's sleep and to persuade schools to push back high-school starting times.
"There is substantial evidence that the lack of sleep can cause accidents, imperil students' grades and lead to or exacerbate emotional problems," says U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who has introduced a bill that would provide federal grants to help school districts defray the cost of pushing back school starting times. Adjusting school schedules, Lofgren says, "could do more to improve education and reduce teen accidents and crime than many more expensive initiatives."
The research has also spurred further investigations into why teens need extra sleep, the effects of sleep deprivation on cognition, emotion regulation and psychopathology, and the long-term consequences of chronic sleep deprivation.
Dogma reversed
For decades, experts believed that people require less sleep as they move from infancy through adulthood.
It's easy to see why this belief persisted: Adolescents sleep less than they did as children, declining from an average of 10 hours a night during middle childhood to fewer than 7.5 hours by age 16. According to Wolfson and Carskadon's 1998 study, 26 percent of high school students routinely sleep less than 6.5 hours on school nights, and only 15 percent sleep 8.5 hours or more. The same study indicated that to make up for lost sleep, most teens snooze an extra couple of hours on weekend mornings--a habit that can lead to poorer-quality sleep.
But to researchers' surprise, in the past two decades studies have shown that teen-agers require considerably more sleep to perform optimally than do younger children or adults. Starting around the beginning of puberty and continuing into their early 20s, Carskadon and colleagues have shown, adolescents need about 9.2 hours of sleep each night, compared with the 7.5 to 8 hours that adults need.
In addition to needing more sleep, adolescents experience a "phase shift" during puberty, falling asleep later at night than do younger children. Researchers long assumed that this shift was driven by psychosocial factors such as social activities, academic pressures, evening jobs and television and Internet use. In the past several years, however, sleep experts have learned that biology also plays a starring role in adolescents' changing sleep patterns, says Carskadon.
Indeed, Carskadon's research is greatly responsible for that new understanding. In a pair of groundbreaking studies published in 1993 and 1997, she and colleagues found that more physically mature girls preferred activities later in the day than did less mature girls, and that in more physically mature teens, melatonin production tapered off later than it did in less mature teens. Those findings, Carskadon says, suggest that the brain's circadian timing system--controlled mainly by melatonin--switches on later at night as pubertal development progresses.
Changes in adolescents' circadian timing system, combined with external pressures such as the need to awaken early in the morning for school, produce a potentially destructive pattern of early-morning sleepiness in teen-agers, Carskadon argues. In a laboratory study of 40 high-school students published in the journal Sleep (Vol. 21, No. 8) in 1998, she, Wolfson and colleagues examined the effect of changing school starting times from 8:25 a.m. to 7:20 a.m.
Their results were disturbing: Almost half of the students who began school at 7:20 were "pathologically sleepy" at 8:30, falling directly into REM sleep in an average of only 3.4 minutes--a pattern similar to what is seen in patients with narcolepsy.
Those findings, says Carskadon, persuaded her that "these early school start times are just abusive. These kids may be up and at school at 8:30, but I'm convinced their brains are back on the pillow at home."
Elusive questions
The evidence of adolescents' increased need for sleep and that many--if not most--teen-agers are chronically sleep deprived has raised further questions. Particularly elusive, says Carskadon, has been the question of why adolescents' circadian clocks shift to a later phase around the beginning of puberty.
One possibility, she believes, is that the brain's sensitivity to light changes during adolescence. At the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in June, she and colleagues presented research showing that in the evening, exposure to even very dim lighting delayed melatonin secretion for participants who were in middle or late puberty, but not for prepubertal participants.
Carskadon is also interested in how teen-age alcohol use might affect the brain's sleep system. Following up on studies in adults that have established a link between drinking problems and changes in sleep patterns, for example, she and her colleagues plan to examine whether during early development, young people with a family history of problem drinking might have abnormalities in the brain mechanisms that govern sleep.
Just as important as the question of why sleep patterns change during adolescence is the issue of how sleep deprivation influences adolescents' emotion regulation and behavior. Many researchers have noted that sleep-deprived teen-agers appear to be especially vulnerable to psychopathologies such as depression and ADHD, and to have difficulty controlling their emotions and impulses.
Although it's difficult to untangle cause and effect, it's likely that sleep deprivation and problems controlling impulses and emotions exacerbate one another, leading to a "negative spiral" of fatigue and sleepiness, labile emotions, poor decision-making and risky behavior, says Ronald E. Dahl, MD, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Despite the evidence that insufficient sleep affects young people's thinking, emotional balance and behavior, the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation on learning, emotion, social relationships and health remain uncertain.
"There's a real need for longitudinal studies to follow through later childhood and adulthood," says psychologist Avi Sadeh, PhD, a sleep researcher at Tel Aviv University. Although research has amply demonstrated that sleep problems affect young people's cognitive skills, behavior and temperament in the short term, he says, "It's not at all clear to what extent these effects are long-lasting."
Researchers push for school changes, public outreach
With such a wealth of evidence about the prevalence of adolescent sleep deprivation and the risks it poses, many sleep researchers have become involved in efforts to persuade school districts to push back high-school starting times so that teens can get their needed rest.
Some schools argue that adjusting school schedules is too expensive and complicated. But others have responded positively to sleep experts' pleas. The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit public schools from starting before 8:30 a.m., and Massachusetts lawmakers are also weighing the issue. And Lofgren's "Zzzzz's to A's" bill, first introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998, would provide federal grants of up to $25,000 to school districts to help cover the administrative costs of adjusting school start times.
These efforts are a move in the right direction, says Wolfson. But, she says, changing school start times isn't the entire answer. "I think we have to be educating children, parents and teachers about the importance of sleep, just as we educate them about exercise, nutrition and drug and alcohol use."
Toward that end, several public-education efforts are now under way:
* With a grant from the Simmons mattress company, Cornell's Maas recently produced a film on teen-age sleep deprivation, its consequences and the "golden rules" for healthy sleep. The film is scheduled for distribution through parent-teacher associations and school principals this fall. In August, Maas also published a children's book, "Remmy and the Brain Train," which discusses why the brain requires a good night's sleep.
* Next year, the National Center for Sleep Disorders Research at the National Institutes of Health plans to release a supplemental sleep curriculum for 10th-grade biology classes, addressing the biology of sleep, the consequences of insufficient sleep and the major sleep disorders. In a related effort, the center is coordinating a sleep-education campaign aimed at 7- to 11-year-olds.
* Wolfson and colleague Christine A. Marco, PhD, a psychologist at Worcester State College, are pilot-testing an eight-week sleep curriculum for middle-school students. As part of the curriculum, students keep sleep diaries, play creative games and participate in role-playing about sleep, and set goals--for example, for the amount of sleep they want to get or for regulating their caffeine intake. Preliminary results indicate that the curriculum helps students improve their sleep habits.
"Changing school start times is one critical measure we can take to protect young people's sleep," says Wolfson. "And then, if we can only understand what's going on with sleep in these sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, we can intervene to change their sleep behavior before it gets out of hand."
5. Ralph Emerson-conversation *
Longitudinal problem through school career – work ethic
“I can work with them if they don’t have the skills but do the homework. But if they don’t do the homework….”
6. Paula Winter*
For what it's worth - I suggest we look at attendance of students who are failing.
Also - of those students failing - how many are transfers to Skyview?
For upperclassmen - how many have jobs and how many hours are they working?
I know there are restrictions but some times the kids are asked to work very long and late hours.
7. Polly Earnest*
It has been my experience that students who are failing benefit from support and being held accountable. One of the ways to better understand the student and his/her needs is to have a team meeting which includes teachers, parents, the student plus support personnel from the school....including the school nurse, counselor and administrator. Student failure in a class is very often connected to depression. The depression may be the initial contributing factor which prevents the student from being able to focus and complete classwork...or it may be the end result of failing a class for whatever reason.
The group meeting with the student can address exactly why the student feels he/she is failing. It might be that extra tutoring or other classroom accommodations can give enough support to boost the student's self confidence to succeed. It might be that just knowing all the people around the table are there for support at any time will help. It might be that the student proclaims not to care enough to do any work; that's when the counselor can take the cue to gently ask the parent about the consideration of counseling. Depression is a major diagnosis for teens.
Learning and success is about trust and self-esteem.
In conversation Polly suggested weekly MDT’s (Multi-Disciplinary Team Meetings for IEP kids or kids who were failing – their teachers, nurse, admin and others) -BQ
8. Tad Thompson
Bev, Kym,
One of my psychology kids did their recent experiment assignment on if his grades and attention in class would improve if he did not have his cell phone. He had his parents take his cell phone away for a week and hd documented his attention in class, grades on assignments and over grades. He reported that he completed more work, paid more attention in class, and understood what was covered in class far more without his cell phone. He was very happy about his grade improvement and attributed it to not being distracted by his phone. However, upon the completion of the week he took the cell phone back and openly said that he would rather have his phone with him than get better grades.
I have to suspect that their have been studies on the influence of cell phones, music players, etc on the attention of students in class. Have those been explored by the group looking into this? It seems to me that the affluent area we teach in gives rise to opportunity for students to have more of these distractions.
One more thought, what was the percentage of F's per grade level at each of the schools? The numbers are not as important as the percentage. Of course we will have more when we have 200 more students per grade level.
Kym, could we get a spreadsheet that matched the number of F's to the number of times absent in class. I have students failing CWP and most have missed over 15 days already this semester. Many of the F's have missed over 40% of class. It seems that this could be a major player in the numbers of F's.
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