Back to school: Three reasons students fail
Every year, we hear about how they fail, score miserably on standardized tests and drop out.
This is not to say that there hasn’t been improvement. The high school graduation rate for U.S. students was 82 percent in 2013-14, representing “the highest level since states adopted a new uniform way of calculating graduation rates five years ago,” according to the U.S. Department of Education.
To help students to the finish line, schools have added programs, both in school and online. At the same time, educators have focused on understanding why some students don’t make it. Here are three pieces of research that explore why students fail:
1. They feel unsafe.
Let’s start with a question. Academic success depends on: A) good study habits; B) natural talent; C) a feeling of security at school.
While traditional wisdom would favor A or B, the answer, according to research published earlier this year, is C. Students who have been victimized or feel unsafe are more likely to have trouble achieving in the classroom.
The research, by Canadian academics, used data from the Québec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, initiated in 1998 with a group of 2,120 Quebec 5-month-old infants. By age 13, students who felt safer at school were also more engaged in the classroom and less likely to be depressed.
“Increasing student feelings of safety at school (e.g., by reducing victimization, improving the overall school and neighborhood safety climate) is likely to represent an effective strategy for promoting classroom engagement,” the authors concluded.
The study is "Feelings of Safety at School, Socioemotional Functioning, and Classroom Engagement" by Carolyn Côté-Lussier, a researcher with the University of Ottawa's Department of Criminology, and Caroline Fitzpatrick, a researcher affiliated with Concordia's PERFORM Centre for preventive health. It appears in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
2. They lose the fire.
Lack of motivation can be an infection that spreads, according to the 2012 report, Student Motivation— An Overlooked Piece of School Reform by the Center on Education Policy of The George Washington University.
“If students aren’t motivated, it is difficult, if not impossible, to improve their academic achievement, no matter how good the teacher, curriculum or school is," the report says. "Moreover, unmotivated students can disengage other students from academics, which can affect the environment of an entire classroom or school.”
Absenteeism is a major contributor of student failure, according to a 2012 report by Robert Balfanz, research professor, and Vaughan Byrnes, researcher, for Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education.
"America’s education system is based on the assumption that barring illness or an extraordinary event, students are in class every weekday. So strong is this assumption that it is not even measured,” they write.
Six states -- Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island -- collected data addressing the issue.
“Such limited data produce only an educated guess at the size of the nation’s attendance challenge,” the authors say. “A national rate of 10 percent chronic absenteeism seems conservative and it could be as high as 15 percent, meaning that 5 million to 7.5 million students are chronically absent. Looking at this more closely sharpens the impact. In Maryland, for instance, there are 58 elementary schools that have 50 or more chronically absent students; that is, two classrooms of students who miss more than a month of school a year. In a high school, where chronic absenteeism is higher, there are 61 schools where 250 or more students are missing a month or more of school.”
Absentees fall into three categories, according to the report:
- Students not attending school because of illness, family responsibilities or other pressing reasons, such as housing problems.
- Students not attending because they feel unsafe, harassed or bullied.
- Students not attending school because they and/or their parents see no value in education.
The report is, “The Importance of Being in School: A report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Schools,” by Balfanz and Byrnes.
Related:
When school standards become fighting words
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