Posts Tagged high school dropouts

You Can Teach Someone to Read

At least 30 million people living in America are illiterate. This includes students who cannot read to their grade level as well as adults who never learned this vital skill. Interestingly, there are more than 30 million pre-boomers living here too. If those of us born between 1930 and 1945 helped just one person to learn to read it would go a long way in wiping out illiteracy.

When I was learning to read in the early ’40s schools taught us the fundamentals, and our parents made sure we read at home as well as complete the rest of the homework assignments. This approach worked nicely for my generation. But something went terribly wrong along the way. Teachers lost control of the classrooms and schools became conveyor belts to graduation rather than institutions of learning. Parents lost control of their kids through permissiveness and their lack of involvement in the education process. Children who don’t learn how to read become adults who don’t know how to read. The result is a dumber and more dangerous America.

Look at the disturbing facts offered by the National Association of Adult Literacy (NAAL). One in four children grows up unable to read, most have parents who don’t know how to read. Nearly half of these adults live in poverty. Three out of four receive food stamps, since 90% of those on welfare are high school dropouts. And teenage girls below the poverty level are six times more likely to be unwed mothers than girls who read. There are also unmeasured health care costs that can be attributed to low literacy. And US industries found it necessary to mount educational and retraining programs in order to make non-readers capable of doing more than menial jobs.

“Two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare. The fourth grade is the watershed year,” the NAAL stated. It shows 85% of all juveniles who interface with the court system are functionally illiterate, as are more than 60% of all prison inmates. So it is logical to assume that education will make all of us safer as potential criminals learn and develop the tools needed to function within the law and become useful members of society.

This information indicates there are problems for the federal, state and local governments to solve or for the school boards to address. However, illiteracy lives in virtually all neighborhoods throughout the country and we not even recognize it, because people will go to almost any lengths to hide this malady from others.

Let’s do something to help. Pre-boomers have time to help at schools, boys and girls clubs, churches, and adult education venues. Contact any of these near you and volunteer to help with their reading learning programs. If they don’t have one, offer to start one after going online and finding out what this entails. This is a wonderful opportunity to make a contribution to society as a whole, and it will be a blessing to each of us accepting the challenge.

Education and Emotional Intelligence

How can we expect our youth to be good leaders if many of our educators and parents are not? Emotional intelligence helps us to form a strong foundation for making good life decisions. Studies show that at best, IQ only contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, leaving 80 percent to other forces.

We expect our youth to graduate from school with the tools necessary to be successful throughout life. Most of us can agree that these expectations are not being met. For example, South Carolina has a dropout rate somewhere between 35 % and 55 %. At a 50% dropout rate, the South Carolina economy is losing $273 million per year in revenue from lost wages, taxes and productivity for only one year of South Carolina high school dropouts. Multiply that by a 30-year lifetime and the costs to the South Carolina economy is $8.19 Billion for one lost class. We can multiply that cost by years of dropouts and then multiply it across the country.

Statistics also show that high school dropouts are 3.5 times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested and 8 times as likely to be in jail or prison. So when we add in the cost of jails, prisons, alcohol and drug abuse centers and mental institutions, we begin to get an understanding of the cost to society of this lost potential.

What is happening with our challenged youth? They feel they are not being heard and accepted. They are voting with their feet by not completing their education. We have been attempting to fit them into a small box of possibilities while they want to expand into the vastness of their potentiality. Instead of hearing the dreams and desires of these challenged yet talented kids, we have been telling them what they are to become. Many youth leave high school and college not knowing what they want. They may be discouraged from pursuing their dreams by those who have no dreams. They do not get engaged. They do not understand how the work they are doing in school applies to their lives.

In order to capture the passion of others, we must build emotional bonds. Brain research shows that all our decisions are made by routing sensory signals through the emotional part of the brain. If there is a compelling event, the brain can literally be hijacked by this most ancient part of our brain before the thinking brain has a chance to engage.

Almost 2/3 of our values and beliefs are formed before the age of five. Our emotional impressions and memories are based on emotions from our past. They create feelings and feelings create our thoughts. Research has shown that we are over 80% unconscious everyday. In most cases we do not realize that we are making decisions based on beliefs from the past that may or may not apply to the current situation. The way we think causes our behavior. Our behavior causes responses or reactions from others that either build up or tear down relationships. We then build successful or unsuccessful outcomes. The resulting cycle is the way we think becomes our habits of thought and these habits of thought become our attitudes.
Attitudes are a key component of emotional intelligence and play a major role in success. We can learn to be mindful and responsible for what we are thinking while making a choice for success thoughts. When we have negative thoughts that move us away from our goals, we can recognize them and choose differently. Developing a successful attitude becomes the preferred choice when we determine that we are responsible for choosing positive thoughts that move us closer to our goals.

Another key component of emotional intelligence is building relationships through compassion. We are not islands and we cannot reach our goals alone. For those children who are not taught how to build relationships, they may be ostracized from groups. Many are not taught to be compassionate and do not understand and value each other’s differences. Children are taught to be competitive and may undermine each other as a matter of habit. All of this carries over into our adult life unless we learn how to overcome our relationship obstacles. However, when we are taught how to build relationships, we learn to recognize the value of each person. Even relationship-challenged youth can learn to engage with others to assist them to achieve their goals. It is a win – win for everyone involved.

A third key component is to build hope in us and in others by establishing goals. We want and need to have a vision and a purpose in our life. We want to understand what is important to us in the social, mental, physical, ethical, family and career areas of our life. These are the things that get us out of bed in the morning and that give us passion. These things will clarify for us what our values are. We can then establish what is important. By setting goals and moving toward them, we find hope. When we are hopeful, we find our joy. We can then play a part in helping others to be hopeful and to achieve their aspirations.

These concepts help to build strong leaders. There is a great need to educate our students about what it takes to make good life decisions. This can only be carried out by educators and parents who understand it themselves. So I repeat the question … can we really expect our children to be good leaders if our educators and parents are not? When we do not understand the underlying basis for deciding what is a good choice and what is a bad choice, we have no method in place to help ourselves and others to recognize what is moving ourselves and others closer to the kind of life we want and what is moving us further away from it.

The Education and Economic Development Act is a South Carolina law that has a great deal of insight. It requires, in addition to several other significant provisions that character education be taught. When we build our educators into emotionally intelligent leaders with an emphasis on attitude, interpersonal skills and goal achievement, they will engage with students in their dreams and educate them in leadership skills. Then, we will truly have a totally engaged student population who are mindful of their attitudes, compassionate for others and have hope for their future.

As Founder of Kinesis Development LLC, Kathie Bobbitt builds potential and high performance in youth, educators, executives and organizations through seminars, workshops, executive and group coaching. The Kinesis Development processes include entrepreneurial and executive coaching and strategic planning, optimized process improvement and time strategies. Her focus is on Personal and Organizational Leadership and Character Education.