It’s an awkward phrase — “at-promise” — but I sort of like it.

 “At-promise” is how the public schools here in Alexandria, Va., refer to students who previously might have been labeled “at-risk.” I learned about this nomenclature yesterday from The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, whose Class Struggle blog harkens back to a July 23 newspaper column by Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman explaining the district’s rationale.

“We use the term ‘at-promise’ in Alexandria City Public Schools to describe children who have the potential to achieve at a higher rate than they are currently achieving,” Morton wrote in the Alexandria Gazette Packet. “Really all children are at-promise because we, as educators, have made a promise to each and every child that we will work toward higher achievement for all…”

“At-risk” means at risk for failure, and it’s an important designation. It tells adults who work with these children that they have special needs, in the broadest sense, and deserve extra support. Two years ago, I wrote an ASBJ series called “Children at Risk,” which looked at some of the reasons why disadvantaged children are more likely to fail, reasons that include inadequate nutrition and health care, dysfunctional family life, and childhoods spent in violent or drug-prone neighborhoods.  By the time I reached the end of the series, however, I wanted a more positive name for these students. So the last story (so far) uses a kind of hybrid label: “Children at Risk/ Children of Hope.”
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Photo courtesy of Stockvault

Okay, I don’t know about you. But if I didn’t know—or care—that my kid was truant from school regularly, I don’t think a free plate of curry is going to change my ways. But apparently it works in jolly old England.

At least, that’s what the Daily Telegraph reports. Apparently, truancy rates have dropped by half since the Glenfield Infant School, in Southampton, began “offering parents the chance to win a meal worth £40 if their children miss fewer than 5 percent of their classes.”

The practice has garnered some criticism from those who see the prize as a form of bribery for doing what the law-and one’s parental responsibilities-demand.

“It is a legal requirement to bring your children to school,” one teacher union leader complained. “But this gives out the message that you don’t do anything in life unless there is a reward. If a parent doesn’t send their child to school, they should get a prison sentence, not a curry. It’s bribery, totally inappropriate, and bordering on lunacy.”

Darned right. I never cottoned to the multitude of bribes that U.S. schools have been guilty of offering over the years. Pizza for reading a book? Cash for simply showing up at school?
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According to whom you asked, the threat of swine flu has either subsided or remains uncertain, but one thing is for sure: handwashing is one of the most effective ways to avoid spreading the H1N1 virus … though that healthy habit may be harder to do in some schools than others. Meanwhile, Gallup—which has gauged the attitudes and opinions of society for more than 70 years— turned its attention to middle and high school students for the first-time in its polling history in order  to find a solution to the drop out crisis. Read these entries and more from this week’s Leading Source. Happy reading and we’ll see you Monday.

My son sits next to a boy who has been suspended twice this school year, and it’s only February. Suspended two times — in the fifth grade. Both times were for fighting, once on the school bus and once on the playground.  According to my son, his classmate is OK to be around most of the time, but when he gets angry, he lashes out.

I’m not an educator or a counselor, but even I can see that the boy has poor impulse control, and all the suspensions in the world won’t solve that problem.  And from what my son says, he is also struggling academically, and days spent away from the classroom certainly isn’t going to make that situation improve.

I thought about this boy when I interviewed author Ross Greene. He says millions of students are suspended every year. “There’s an unbelievable number of detentions and expulsions, all pointing in a clear but sad direction: We don’t understand our kids. We continue to apply interventions that don’t serve them well.”

Greene wrote The Explosive Child about children who, as he says, lack the skills to “behave adaptively.” If they could control their impulses, they would. But they can’t.  And our system of rewards and punishments isn’t effective. The threat of punishment or the punishment itself doesn’t work with kids who simply aren’t thinking ahead about the consequences, period.

Greene just published a second book, Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. It is aimed at helping school administrator and teachers deal with hard-to-manage students.

Greene’s answer is a technique called collaborative problem-solving, and it’s being tested in several school districts around the country. It involves having both the child and the adult lay their concerns out and having both sides brainstorm for solutions. It’s not an easy process, Greene says, but it’s certainly preferrable to the cycle of punishment and suspensions that many troubled kids go through.

I wonder how a boy who has been suspended twice in the fifth grade must feel about school and the adults around him.  I wonder about his chances making it through to the 12th grade.  If we’re serious about keeping students in school, Greene’s ideas deserve a chance.

Read my whole interview with Greene here.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor