Develop A “Don’t Give Up” Attitude

A group of South Carolina business leaders commissioned a closer look at their schools and found something they were not looking for. They discovered that their “worst-in-the nation dropout rate” cannot be explained by high poverty levels, single-parent households, or rigorous graduation requirements, as reported on the South Carolina Home Page

Kudos to South Carolina State Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, who pointed to recent state-sanctioned initiatives targeting truancy and curriculum changes to make high school instruction more relevant to individual student interests. This is a wonderful start to developing a powerful strategy that teachers can use to keep kids in school. The strategy is: Develop a “Don’t Give Up” Attitude.

Why do your students leave school? Do they “step out” to pursue other alternatives, such as full time work or marriage? Do they experience “push out” because the staff passively allows them to leave with little effort to help them identify problems or reasons to stay? Or do they “drop out” because of boredom, alienation, low academic skills or a negative perception of themselves as a learner?

Gene R. Carter, Executive Director for ASCD, describes in his article “Is it Good for the Kids? What our High School Students Need” the efforts of a high school journalism teacher who chased down one of her students on the football field to remind him his paper was overdue, and how it changed his life. Now that is the “Don’t Give Up Attitude” I was talking about.

Would more of your students stay in school if each, and every one of us ratcheted up our “Don’t Give Up Attitude”?