By Brenda Fullick

The East High School math teacher didn't know it, but he was about to change a life that day.

One of his students, Joe Wayman, had asked him how his day was going. The teacher assumed that this boy was mocking him, treating him disrespectfully like so many of the other students had.

"He grabbed me by the face and he cornered me," Wayman says. Wayman remembers his teacher squeezing his face angrily, turning his head around so the teen would be forced to look him in the eye as he spoke.

"He told me that I was being disrespectful and sarcastic," Wayman remembers. "He told me to shut my fucking mouth."

But Wayman insists that he really was trying to be supportive that day, offering a little genuine human kindness to a beginning teacher who was obviously struggling.

Wayman, too, had struggled for a very long time. He was a bright kid who hadn't exactly applied himself in school, and he acknowledges a tendency to shoot off his mouth. But something in Joseph Wayman died that day when his teacher lost his temper. That was the moment Wayman gave up hope on education for good.

"After that, I felt like I wasn't going to be respected at all by any teacher," Wayman says. "I felt like there was no one behind me, that there was no one backing me up. I figured, fuck it."

For a little while longer, Wayman's single mom would try to keep him in school, personally dropping him off at East and making sure he walked in those front doors. But Becky Wayman had no idea that her son's school day lasted only as long as it took him to slip through the school and head out the back door.

Wayman would spend his days at a friend's house. His friends were into drugs; they'd get together and take meth or Ecstasy, maybe acid, or sometimes their parents' prescription drugs. Wayman thinks his friends are searching for something, using drugs as a defiant, in-your-face way of getting people to maybe pay some attention to them, "almost like they have something to prove.

"Most parents these days, they don't care," Wayman says. He thinks kids aren't getting enough attention; they aren't getting enough real emotional contact in their lives. "They're not appreciated at home. They're not appreciated by people who know them," Wayman says. Maybe teachers could help fill that void, but he doesn't think they're even trying. "To them, it's a job. It'd be different if the teachers these days really cared."

Wayman specifically remembers two teachers who have been special in his life. One was long time East High School drama teacher Ruth Ann Gaines. "She was just real involved. She cared about the students," he says. And the other was a certain Miss Hankins in night school. Wayman was convinced that Hankins honestly cared about him and the other students. "You can just tell," he says. "You can feel the emotion that came out of her voice when she talked to you."

But as far as Wayman is concerned, most teachers aren't anything like Hankins or Gaines.

"The rest of them couldn't give a rat's ass," he says. "Some of them have a power trip. They're almost like police officers."

Wayman is 19 years old now, and he has no idea how his life will turn out.

"Everybody I know has dropped out of school," he says. "I didn't even pass ninth grade."

The missing 43 percent

During the 2001-02 school year, 3,097 students were enrolled as freshmen in the Des Moines public schools. But three years later, only 1,814 of them were still enrolled as seniors, and just 1,757 of them received their diplomas - that's 57 percent of the original freshman class.

The school district has no figures on the number of teens who may have moved in or out of the district during those years. The district doesn't know how many teens failed, were kicked out of school, became pregnant or simply gave up.

However, based on aggregate enrollment numbers, a full 43 percent of the kids are unaccounted for. That's 43 percent of the population not receiving their high school diplomas, 43 percent of Des Moines' young people unprepared for the most basic of jobs.
Overall, 60 percent of kids who started out as freshmen in 2000-01 managed to attend at least part of their senior year in 2003-04. That breaks out to 63 percent of the white kids, 55 percent of the African-American kids, 73 percent of the Asians and 50 percent of the Hispanics who stayed in high school for more than three years.

This is a very different picture from the one painted on the Des Moines public schools Web site, which suggests that Des Moines has dropout rates that other urban school districts would envy. During the 2003-04 school year, the district reports that only 1.2 percent of the white students in grades 7-12 chose to drop out. The numbers show similarly low dropout rates for minority students in grades 7-12: According to the district, just 2.1 percent of the African-American students, 3.7 percent of Hispanic students and 1.4 percent of Asian students dropped out that year.

The most recently released figure is that Des Moines' graduation rate is 79.5 percent. What's more, the district reports that 78.9 percent of its 2005 graduates planned to continue their studies with college or specialized training after receiving their diplomas.

District officials aren't yet releasing this year's graduation totals from May; they're saying that more students could complete their degree requirements over the summer.

However, it is known that 2,185 students attended classes as seniors for at least part of this past school year - and that comes to 76 percent of the 2,868 students who started out as freshmen in 2002-03.

Black canaries

Mention the name of John Narcisse, and certain educators tend to sigh. The former publisher of the Iowa Bystander (which this week is under new leadership) has made a public pest of himself by repeatedly pointing out that the district's official graduation and dropout rates seem to bear little resemblance to the district's actual enrollment figures.

Narcisse first became interested in the issue several years ago, when he and others conducted hearings in 11 communities across Iowa to study the conditions of African-Americans. The process "was very much data-driven," Narcisse says. He concluded that education is the single most important factor affecting African-American Iowans, because it affects how well people can feed their families, maintain their own health and function as active citizens.

When Narcisse looked at enrollment statistics from schools throughout the state, he was surprised to learn that dropout rates were more than a minority issue. "It transcended the African-American community," he says. "We were more like the canary in the coal mine."

During these hearings, Narcisse learned that different school districts were figuring their graduation rates differently, sometimes counting GEDs as diplomas even though people cannot legally attend GED programs while they are enrolled in regular school programs. He discovered that Des Moines was counting its dropouts separately from the kids who were "expected to re-enroll in the fall." He also found that kids like Wayman who transferred to night school in Des Moines were not counted as dropouts, either, even though most of them eventually stopped showing up.

In a graduation report released this past April, the school administration presents a breakdown of its 79.5 percent graduation rate for the class of 2005. That rate is based on 2,209 students, with 452 counted as dropouts and the remaining 1,757 counted as graduates.

However, enrollment history on file with the Iowa Department of Education maintains that those 2,209 students actually started off as 3,097 students back in 2001-02.

It's difficult to get an accurate picture of how many Des Moines students are dropping out because the real numbers aren't available to the school board or the public, Narcisse alleges. In the Des Moines district, "they don't even attempt to explain the loss of all their students. The fact that these kids have been fast-tracked for failure doesn't even appear statistically."

There are signs that Des Moines students are struggling long before they reach high school: Standardized tests show that Des Moines students perform better in elementary school than they will in middle school. In 2005, 72.6 percent of Des Moines fourth-graders met the basic proficiency standards in math on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and 67.3 percent of them were deemed proficient in reading for their grade level.

But in eighth grade that year, only 57 percent of the students were proficient in math, and only 56.4 percent were proficient in reading.

On the surface, the 11th graders appear to do somewhat better, scoring 63.7 percent proficient in math and 66.3 percent in reading. However, Narcisse points out that most of the marginal students already have dropped out by their junior year. In fact, only 1,599 juniors were enrolled that year, down from the 2,280 eighth-graders enrolled that same year.

Historical data shows a consistent enrollment spike during the freshman year, partly because students who fail their high school classes are not necessarily promoted along with their peers the way they would have been in earlier grades. But for each graduating class, enrollment drops consistently after the freshman year as more students give up.

"In every social and economic group, we have massive academic decline," Narcisse says. However, "almost none of them are counted as dropouts. We create other categories."

Narcisse claims that Superintendent Eric Witherspoon acknowledged changing the way that the district reports data, essentially making it more difficult to track the actual dropout rate. "Over the Witherspoon years, he has systematically removed ways the public and board members track participation and outcome," Narcisse charges.

Witherspoon refused to be interviewed for this story.

Deputy Superintendent Linda Lane released a statement saying that the district's graduation rate is calculated by the Iowa Department of Education, using a formula developed by the National Center for Education Statistics.

In a prepared "State of the Schools" address delivered in October of 2005, Witherspoon stated: "Don't let the naysayers distract us from the truth. Student achievement is rising, the achievement gap is narrowing as the achievement of students is increasing, and more students are graduating. Those are facts."

Witherspoon goes on, "Our school board, our Deputy Superintendent Linda Lane, our high school principals, all have been open and straightforward about our graduation rate, our dropouts, the students we help in alternative settings. All are sincerely focused on keeping all students in school." He tells his audience, "Sadly, some people do not understand or do not acknowledge what an awesome education students are receiving in the Des Moines schools."

Narcisse would like to see the school board and the public asking more pointed questions to find out what's really going on. "I have never seen a school board that has abdicated its responsibility so readily."

Community member Don Rowen, who attended the public interviews of the superintendent candidates to replace Witherspoon when he leaves at the end of June, says it would help if the Des Moines Register printed the real dropout rate. "It's hard to respond when nobody knows what it is," Rowen says.

A national issue

It's common for school districts across the country to inflate their graduate rates and camouflage their true dropout numbers to make their local communities happier, says Marcus Winters, a senior research associate at the Manhattan Institute, where Winters and Jay Greene have used statistical analysis to shake up conventional wisdom about how many American students are really graduating from high school.

If you look to data from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, you'd think that today's kids are less likely to drop out than their parents were. The federal agencies are reporting that nationwide, only 7.3 percent of white students dropped out in 2001, compared to 13.2 percent of white students dropping out back in 1970; the federal government reports that only 10.9 percent of African-American students are dropping out - down significantly from the 27.9 percent dropout rate reported three decades earlier.

But are more American students really staying in school?

Nationally, Winters and Greene believe the overall graduation rate is about 70 percent - which breaks down to 78 percent of white students, 72 percent of Asians, 55 percent of African-Americans and 53 percent of Hispanics.

According to their numbers, Iowa does comparatively well with an overall graduation rate of 85 percent, tied with Wisconsin and North Dakota, lagging behind only New Jersey with its upscale suburbs. Based on their calculations, the lowest graduation rate is in South Carolina, where just 54 percent of the state's students receive their diplomas.

Winters isn't surprised that Narcisse found a discrepancy between Des Moines' historic enrollment data and the district's reported graduation rate.

"It's very common for official graduation rates to be way too high," Winters says. "It really is a state-sponsored myth."

The most notorious example of inflated school performance data can be traced to a man named Rod Paige, whom President George W. Bush named Secretary of Education in 2001. People were talking about the "Houston Miracle," because under Superintendent Paige, Houston's test scores seemed to rise, graduation rates shot up and dropout rates fell to an amazing 1.5 percent. The controversial No Child Left Behind law was passed with bipartisan support to challenge other schools to meet Houston's inspiring performance.

However, that 1.5 percent dropout rate in Houston turned out to be false, and the Texas Education Agency later found what it termed "rampant undercounting" of the dropouts. The district also inflated tests scores by preventing certain students from taking the standardized tests. Outsiders may wonder why Paige didn't get caught earlier, but there can be personal repercussions for speaking up: The assistant principal who ultimately blew the whistle found himself punished with a demotion and a salary cut; he filed a lawsuit against his school district before settling out of court.

Texas may have been the biggest offender in manipulating school statistics, Winters says, but Texas schools certainly weren't alone. School districts created a variety of categories for students so they wouldn't have to count them as dropouts; they didn't count students who went to prison, for instance, and they didn't count students who said they planned to get their GEDs someday.

To be fair, Winters says, it's difficult for schools to accurately track their dropouts. However, it's easy for schools to count the number of kids in class every day.

The Manhattan Institute gets its graduation rates by tracking the number of 14-year-olds in ninth grade against the number of students who receive diplomas during their senior year. Greene and Winters base their research on totals that the schools have reported to the federal government, and they also adjust for local population changes. It isn't a perfect system, they admit, but they think it's more accurate than what most schools have used in the past.

Other researchers have come up with figures that are similar to the Manhattan Institute's results, and the National Governors' Association has since voted to adopt consistent methods for tallying more reliable graduation and dropout figures.

"I think the movement is toward more realistic figures," Winters says. In the past, he says, statistical researchers tended not to give too much weight to districts' official graduation and dropout rates. "Everyone kind of knew that the numbers were just wrong."

Real numbers

For the first time with the class of 2008, Iowa schools will know exactly how many dropouts they have and what their true graduation rates are, according to the Iowa Department of Education.

That's because Iowa students have been assigned numbers, starting with the kids who were freshmen during 2004-05. The new system should give districts the exact number of the number of dropouts, open-enrollment transfers and other changes, says Lee Tack, division administrator for finance and information services at the Department of Education.

The new tracking system is called EASIER - for Electronic Access System for Iowa Education Records. With this new system, students "can't just simply disappear," Tack says. "There has to be an explanation now."

Most states, including Iowa, were in the process of creating a student identifier system before the governors' association decided it would be a good idea to keep better records, Tack says.

Tack insists that Iowa schools are not inflating their graduation rates or covering up their dropout rates - if anything, he says, the system is designed to err on the conservative side. According to Iowa Department of Education figures, the state's overall dropout rate is about 2.35 percent a year, which comes out to about 10 percent over a class' four years of high school.

Tack disagrees with the Manhattan Institute's conclusions about school administrators painting overly rosy pictures of their districts. In fact, he says, Iowa school administrators couldn't manipulate the data even if they wanted to under the current system.

"There just isn't a way you can do that over time," partly because misreporting would be uncovered when individual school administrators change positions, Tack says. "I really think districts have worked hard to provide good data to us and to their publics."

If a district's graduation rate is too low, that needs to be addressed, Tack says. "If they need the resources, they need to be able to show why they need the resources."

The state Department of Education did require the Des Moines school district to change its official graduation rate from 82 percent to 79.5 percent for the 2005 graduating class. The state insisted that the district count people working toward GEDs as dropouts.

Under state law, Tack says, "If you're in a GED program, you're by definition a dropout."

In the past, some school districts have counted GED certificates as diplomas, but districts are now reporting accurately, Tack says. "I would say today, the data's more accurate than it's ever been."

A different reality

Steven Boylan is a 20-year-old dropout from East High School who just doesn't buy the district's official graduation rate - a rate that doesn't match the numbers he's seen among his friends. "That's a bullshit line to keep parents happy," he says. He figures the district is trying to make things look better than they really are to keep the tax dollars flowing in. "They're worried about their funding."

In Boylan's world, everything is about money, about buying and selling, about how to make money and what things are worth. Boylan is a natural-born entrepreneur. He used to make $3,000 a day selling meth and weed, and he had so much extra cash in his pocket that he'd make mortgage payments on other people's houses just because he could.

Boylan got busted for selling and spent three days in jail. The cops confiscated everything they thought had been bought with drug money, including a $35,000 car that he and a friend owned outright. He's now trying to get his life together, working as a night stocker at Hy-Vee and enrolling in a GED program through Scavo, Des Moines' alternative school.

His goal now is to own a successful legal business. "I want it to be legit," Boylan says. "I've already run a successful illegal business." He says a legitimate business would be easier than dealing with all the hepped-up tweakers, the nervously unpredictable meth addicts who stay up all night doing crazy things like taking their televisions apart for no reason at all.

Boylan says his life started falling apart back when he was a student at Goodrell, where he was bullied all the time. "I didn't even want to go to school," he says. "I've had to see psychiatrists and all that over this stuff."

Boylan felt so humiliated that he essentially checked out of school in eighth grade, but he had to wait until he was 16 before he could technically drop out. In the meantime, he walled himself off emotionally. "I sat in class and didn't do anything," he says. "I got straight Fs. I didn't care about being like other people. I was being me."

Boylan felt tormented going to the third-floor classes at East with all the other kids classified with behavior disorders. He could totally identify with the boys at Columbine who shot their classmates out of rage. "I know how those two kids felt," he says. Being mocked by the second-floor students was demeaning. He had no self-respect, and none of the adults at school seemed to care.

His friend Joe Wayman understood; he, too, hated being on the third floor at East. "I've actually contemplated suicide myself," Wayman says. "You feel like you're not wanted."

The boys were looking for somebody to care about them, something to make them feel special.

"From when I was growing up, I thought the football players were the cool guys," Boylan says. Then he found out that the quickest way to prestige was through selling drugs. He discovered that drug dealers are ranked socially by who sells the most.

When you're on the streets selling drugs, "you've got women, you've got cars, you've got everything - at 19, that's everything," Boylan says. He realized that he could sell drugs without a high school diploma and make more money than his parents. "I wasn't making any money sitting in class.

"Personally for me, it wasn't about the drugs," Boylan says. "It was about the money and the power." He remembers thinking smugly, "I've got second-floor kids coming to me now. I'm the man now."

Becky Wayman can see how her son and his friends have suffered from feeling like not enough people cared about them. "It takes a whole network of people who care to get that one kid," she says.

But Boylan insists that he really doesn't need anybody. After all, he says, you're born alone and you die alone. "So what does it matter what other people think of you?"

Finding some passion

"This is so special," a beaming Linda Lane told a group of relatives, coworkers, friends and people from her church who turned out to support her public speech at the Iowa Hall of Pride as she applied to replace Witherspoon as the district's next superintendent. She had so much support, she said, "It's kind of like getting to go to your own funeral."

When Lane applied for the superintendent's job, several people in the community questioned whether she was really just a lock-step extension of Witherspoon after working beside him for so long. But in her speech, she showed an intense interest in reaching the kids who are disconnected now, minority students in particular. She expressed frustration with the "achievement gap," saying the district needs to get past its past disagreements and find some common ground on behalf of the students. "There are kids out there that are desperately needing our help," she said. "We've got to find the common ground. We have to."

Lane's earliest personal background is a study in exclusion. Her father couldn't get a job teaching in Des Moines as an African-American, so he had to go to Texas to find work. Lane and her younger sister were both born after road trips to West Virginia hospitals because their parents refused to deliver their babies in segregated Texas hospitals. It was only after Des Moines started hiring minority teachers that her father, Jim Bowman, moved the family back to Iowa, eventually becoming assistant superintendent before his daughter held the job.

Lane spoke publicly about the need to better connect emotionally with the students, particularly the kids who are surly and nearly impossible to teach in the classroom even though they can be totally charming one-on-one. "If we can get that [charming] personality to show itself in the classroom," she said, "think what we could do."

She talked about helping teachers reconnect with the passion they had before the job became mechanical and morale dropped so low. "It's very important that we engage the hearts, not just the minds, of people who work with kids," Lane said. Although the responsibility for a student's performance needs to shift over time from the teacher to that student, she said, the school first has to find a way to engage the student emotionally.

One of Lane's quiet supporters in the audience was Julius Conner, who describes himself as a member of her church family. Personally, Conner thinks what young people really need is simply encouragement - the more, the better.

Kids need support beyond their families, Conner says. He believes every single school employee, including every custodian, should show that they care about the students by taking a personal interest in their lives.

Lost talent

For a couple of years, people were calling him Zoo Boy.

He and a friend broke into Blank Park Zoo one night and spent the evening looking at zebras. "I smoked a bowl on top of the monkey cage," says Dustin Holzhauser, now 19 years old.

"Holzhauser" means "house of wood" in German, he says. "I impress girls with that."

Holzhauser spent two years staring at the same page in his math book. "It didn't really catch my interest that much," he says. "I knew I had enough smarts to pass. I can read a tape measure."

Holzhauser dropped out of school and transferred to Scavo, where he got his GED, but by that point he was already completely disengaged from school. "Scavo was only four hours, and I still couldn't hang there the whole time."

It's not as though Holzhauser didn't have any special talents. He had been a boy who loved to draw. "I got As in all my art classes," he says. In fact, there was one art teacher, a woman named Evelyn, who let him make two ceiling tiles when everyone else made just one. It was good to get a special privilege like that. It just wasn't enough.

Now he's a young man making $10 an hour digging holes for a construction company, which isn't bad considering the fact that machines do all the heavy lifting, he says.

Holzhauser wanted to be a tattoo artist once, but he doesn't even draw anymore. He just sort of got busy and lost the urge. Now he's not sure what he's going to do with his life. But he does think a lot of Des Moines' young people are in the same situation he's in, and he thinks the school district's enrollment and dropout figures are totally skewed. "We didn't have to go to school to figure out that math don't add up."

Holzhauser's friend Wayman wishes he were in culinary school now, but he doesn't have a diploma. Wayman's favorite thing in the world is making breakfast, maybe whipping up eggs with just a little vanilla, the right amount of milk, pouring the mixture over some browned potatoes, adding some vegetables or whatever else inspires him. "I love cooking," he says. "That's what makes me sane."

After he dropped out of East, Wayman cooked for a while at The Continental in the East Village. "Once that pan touched my hand, I didn't have a worry in the world anymore," he says. But he was so anxious for everything to go well that he was constantly criticizing the waitresses for not working harder. He wanted the meals he prepared to be served quickly, and with the proper presentation. "We have to run a business here," he would tell his coworkers. "It has to look nice. We're trying to make a statement in society."

And so Wayman was fired, partly for being too uptight.

Boylan and Wayman joke that maybe they'll open a strip club together, a place serving breakfast so the patrons could sober up before they drive home. Boylan would handle the business side, of course, and Wayman would be in charge of the kitchen.

Wayman wishes now that he'd stayed in school. It's just that he didn't see much of a reason for it at the time, and none of the teachers seemed to care. When teachers are making $40,000 to put up with disruptive students, he says, "they think they shouldn't have to care, because it's not their jobs."

Whose job is it?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has released a report, "The Silent Epidemic," based on a survey of dropouts in 25 communities across the U.S. The survey found:

- 47 percent of high school dropouts said a major reason they dropped out was that school wasn't interesting.

- 38 percent of the kids said they had "too much freedom" and too few rules.

- 68 percent said their parents became more involved only when they realized the students were on the verge of dropping out.

- 56 percent of the teens said they knew of a staff person at school they could talk to about their problems.

The study found that students don't drop out of school suddenly, but instead show warning signs over time: low grades, poor attendance, skipping class, lack of participation in school activities, disappearing for three-hour lunches.

Des Moines School Board President Phil Roeder says it's unreasonable to expect the schools to make up for the emotional connections that kids are missing at home. Even if students spend eight hours a day in school, 180 days a year, they're spending five-sixths of their time somewhere else, he says.

"Parents need to step up and have high expectations for their own children," Roeder says. "That, more than anything we do as a school district, is going to improve education and improve the graduation rate."

Making kids successful "is a community-wide rather than a school-wide issue," he says.

Roeder says the Des Moines district is now getting more realistic data with new high school administrator Liz Fagen, who's looking at the national initiatives and reviewing how the numbers are calculated. By using the Manhattan Institute's calculation methods, she came up with a 77 percent graduation rate, which actually is just a couple of points below the official 79.5 percent graduation rate. "I think we're getting a good picture," Roeder says. And he says that any dropout rate - whether it's 5 percent or 50 percent - needs to be lowered, since it's nearly impossible for people today to get decent-paying jobs and health insurance without a diploma.

"I know there's the old expression, 'figures lie and liars figure,'" Roeder says. However, he says the Des Moines district is presenting an accurate picture of what's happening to its students. "The fact of the matter is the entire country is going through a revision of how graduation rates are calculated."

The school board decided to hire Nancy Sebring from Colorado as the new superintendent, effective July 1. She was chosen largely because she has a strong background in curriculum development, Roeder says, able to develop educational programs for the higher-performing students as well as the ones who might not make it to graduation.

Meanwhile, the school board has been under significant criticism for its May 2005 decision to close five neighborhood schools. Mother and day-care operator Gina Lewis is one of the people who collected signatures on a petition to save Adams, but she decided that the school board didn't really care what the parents thought. She says the closing of Adams will lower her East Side property values while making it harder for parents to be involved after their children are bused to other neighborhoods. "As a parent who works, it's not as convenient," she says.

Real estate agent Linda Westergaard, president of the Douglas Acres Neighborhood Association, specializes in property sales on the east side of Polk County. She says the schools are the main reason she hears when families move out of Des Moines. "I sit at an open house every weekend, and what I hear is 'Get me out of Des Moines public schools, get me out of Des Moines public schools.'

"I love Des Moines public schools," Westergaard says. "I could not have given my children a better education. It breaks my heart to see families moving out of the city."
Westergaard agrees with Roeder that the issue is bigger than the school district, and the whole community needs to get involved. "The city spends thousands of dollars to get people to move into our city, but we're not doing a good job of keeping them here," she says. "We're all in this together. It really should be about what's best for our kids. Closing elementary schools is not best for our kids."

Many East Side parents work nights, and it's especially hard for them to be involved in teacher conferences and school open houses when their children are bused to different neighborhoods, Westergaard says. "All of a sudden, we have parents that become disconnected from our schools."

The school district has "come in and continually closed East Side schools. It seems to be happening east of the river more than it happens west of the river," she says. "We've got reports that show children do better in small, neighborhood schools. If kids are doing well in their neighborhood schools, they're going to be less likely to drop out."

"That's kind of silly," Roeder responds. "Kids don't drop out in third grade."

Roeder says there's no correlation between school closings and dropout rates.

"Anybody that is making that argument is kind of looking for excuses," he says. "It's not as if we're closing high schools."

Beyond money

Often in the world of education, people say the solution to all problems is more money. But there's not much of an empirical relationship between increased school funding and better student outcomes, according to Winters at the Manhattan Institute.

"Over the last 30 years, we've more than doubled the amount of money we spend per pupil, K-12, in the U.S.," Winters says. "Test scores are flat over that time period," and real graduation rates are down slightly. In other industries, he says, "we would usually call that a productivity crisis."

Research shows that options like vouchers and charter schools can help, he says, apparently because a little competition inspires schools to do better.

Kittie Weston-Knauer, principal at Scavo, finds that today's young people have different expectations about their education, partly because they've grown up with technology. Students today have less understanding that they need to do things they might not want to do if they want to reach longer-term goals.

"That instant gratification is something they think they are entitled to," she says. "In reality, there is not that instant gratification."

This generation is also less willing to simply soak up the words of their teachers - "the sage on the stage" - and that means today's teachers have to adapt and play a more supportive role in education, Knauer says. "Now teachers need to be 'the guide on the side.'"

Knauer talks about schools needing to offer more relevant, project-based learning activities, letting kids have a say in what they learn. It can be difficult to get students to learn algebra when they don't see how it applies to their lives, she says, even though "we know algebra helps to develop those thinking skills."

Scavo picks up students throughout the school year from the district's other schools. It started with 280 students last fall and had 475 at the end of the year. Of that group, 59 students graduated. Knauer knows that's not a great graduation rate, but she also knows Scavo is a second chance for students who otherwise might not have any other options.

At Scavo, students work at their own pace; technically, they can stay in high school at Scavo until they're 25 years old. Knauer tells her students they're not allowed to fail. She tells them, "We've got nothing but time."

A key difference between Scavo and the other schools is personalized attention. "That is critical. That's one of the reasons our numbers have grown so," Knauer says. Each student has an advocate who makes a personal phone call to the family each week. That means that every week, someone from the school has contact with a significant adult in that student's life.

Scavo may sound like an expensive program to run with all that individual attention, but the typical student-to-teacher ratio is 18-1. At one point, the ratio was up to about 23 students for every teacher. But the teachers find time to make personal contact. "It's not just about money," Knauer says.

"I know who every last one of my students are," Knauer says. All the students call her by her first name. "We don't have to worry about putting on airs, or putting on fronts for folks," she says. When so many of her students come to Scavo with a histories of fighting and abuse, she believes the biggest thing she can teach her students is how to get along with other people in this world.

"They individually are just great young adults, very bright," she says. "And all they want is for someone to direct them, someone to support them as they continue into adulthood."

There was a time when young people got that support from their parents, as well as their extended families, their neighbors, their schools, and the people at church. Kids aren't getting that support anymore, she says.

"What has happened is we lost that human touch. That human contact doesn't always exist," she says. "Our students don't know love."

And she's not talking about sexual love, she says, but "that human love, where people truly respect you and will do whatever they can to support your growth - that they nurture you." Knauer calms rage-filled students by offering them consistency. "What we say is, 'We all need a break here.'"

One of the hardest things to teach today's students, Knauer says, is that they are responsible for their actions. Often, students feel they've been unjustly punished. "What they don't realize is that there are consequences for every behavior," she says. "We as a society haven't taught it to them."

Knauer doesn't try to pretend that she's perfect. She's willing to let the students see her as vulnerable, as someone who can own her mistakes. "I tell people, 'Just because I'm an old lady out here doing my thing doesn't mean I don't need my share of help.'"

The students talk to Scavo staff about their problems, like pregnancy and thoughts of suicide. "This is real stuff," Knauer says. Scavo has students from the South Side, South of Grand, every zip code in the city. "It doesn't matter what side of the tracks you come from. Everyone needs that help and support. We're finding more and more kids who are in emotional crisis."

People need to keep in mind that these students will take their places in society, she says. "It is critical that we support them in whatever way we can. If we don't prepare them to stand on their own two feet, who in the world is going to support them?"
Knauer makes a point of having the Scavo students photographed as often as possible, and of giving the students CDs with those photos so they will remember themselves during happy times. "I think it's important for students to see themselves always in a positive light."

One of the Scavo students is Anais Vega, who transferred there because she was expelled from the other high schools. "I did criminal mischief," she says. She spray-painted walls at East and North, and she can't exactly say why. "My parents were in Mexico," she shrugs. The other schools didn't want her, she says. "Since they knew I was like bad or whatever, they didn't even care."

Anyway, Anais likes working at her own pace at Scavo. "You feel like you're getting way more done," she says.

Fellow student Lisa Thomas feels the same way. She especially likes the personalized attention, and the fact that there's an on-site day care.

"I was using while I was pregnant," Lisa says. "This school gives you another chance."

Lisa is 17 years old and still a freshman. But she says she's motivated to make it through. "It's about my daughter now, too." CV

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