The High Price of Helping Kids

Prince George's County Maryland has a program to help kids pass the High School Assessments, a series of four tests that students graduating in 2009 must pass in order to receive their diplomas. The program called Twilight Academy is desinged to help the more than half of county students who have failed the exam.

In a Washington Post article, County School Superintendant John Deasy pleaded with parents:

"I am distressed at an enormous level that we put together a program which is the best in Maryland and only one out of six children are going that need to take it," he said. "I need you to get your child to that program. I can build it, I can produce it, I can staff it, but I can't go to your home and make your child go there."

Deasy is running into a common problem, the lack of parental involvement in education. This is not say that parents don't care, for I think we all believe they do, but for the freshmen and sophomores at whom the program is targeted, there is no urgency to the need to pass the exams. After all, graduation for the students discussed in the article is two years away, practically an eternity for almost all students.

But one does have to wonder about the efficacy of the design of the Twilight Academy. According to the article, students meet two to four times a week for an hour to an hour and half to practice for the exam and get instructional aid in the subject matter. But the program generally does not begin until 4:00PM, a time when most students have already been at school for 8 hours. From the description of activities in the article, it seems as though these students are already exhausted beyond the point of being able to glean anything useful from the class.

While the scheduling options are, of course, greatly limited by the clock and the calendar, does adding an extra 90 minutes of extra instruction at the end of the day actually going to help? But there are also other questions that I have.

How is the Twilight Academy integrated with the student's other, regular instruction? Are the two complementary or do they clash in timing and purposes? If the student passed their basic instructional class but failed the exam, how much study goes into determining the root cause of teh failure? Is the failure the result of lack of knowledge of the subject, or lack of understanding of how to take the exam? Was the failure the result of one or two poorly understood concepts were remediation in those areas would be more effective?

Chances are, very little actual analysis went into why each student failed to pass teh exam the first time. This may of course be the result of an inability to actually review the exam by school leaders, but that seems unlikely. But the county and state school leaders have access to the very data they need to help these students, but likely failed to take advantage of it. Before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a remediation program, why not spend a few thousand dollars to analyze the data and then determine what is best for each kid. If a student is having problems with one discreet area, why torment them with a full review?

A short, focused intervention will improve the chances of teh student passing by working on the weakest areas. Such a effort will also reduce costs, in terms of student and teacher time, to such a level as to make the program more cost effective.

While it is too soon to tell how effective the Twilight academy will be in helping students pass the HSAs, I would be surprised if it makes a stellar impact.