BAVC/The Factory assembled a team of four advanced youth filmmakers to create four videos; the content of which is intended to help counteract the significant high school dropout rate in Oakland, CA as Part of the American Graduate Initiative
Monthly Archives: August 2012
Pubcasting Tackles Dropout Crisis
Current.org
August 20th, 2012
Written by: Dru Sefton
The massive American Graduate project is all about potential — the potential of students who stay in school to graduate, as well as the potential of public broadcasting stations to serve as community conveners working to identify and tackle problems.
The multiplatform five-year initiative, seeded with $15 million from CPB, has expanded in its first year to encompass 600 partners working with 25 hub stations serving markets with some of the worst graduation rates in the country. An additional 41 stations received National Center for Media Engagement community-engagement grants for outreach or productions customized to the education needs in their communities.
Twelve Teacher Town Hall meetings convened by local stations have drawn more than 1,200 educators to discussions of their challenges in the classroom. And with next month’s American Graduate Day, participating pubcasters will bring the discussion to a much wider audience through a seven-hour telethon produced by New York’s WNET.
The Sept. 22 broadcast marathon, offered to stations nationwide, will highlight organizations battling the issue and recruit volunteers to join the cause as reading mentors or tutors by calling a centralized toll-free number. The telethon kicks off a week of related program specials airing on public television and radio stations nationally.
The CPB-backed efforts are all focused on a persistent national problem: One in four students doesn’t finish high school — that’s more than 1 million dropouts per year. The numbers are even more acute for African-American and Hispanic students, whose graduation rates are below 65 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
CPB has high-profile national partners in the fight, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; America’s Promise Alliance, founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell; and Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center.
The initiative has also prompted many collaborative projects within the system. Frontline is working with three Local Journalism Centers to produce coverage of regional educational issues. The PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs are partnering with stations to get local kids involved in telling their stories. The Independent Television Service is spearheading American Graduate Latino, which will produce Spanish- and English-language versions of the core American Graduate content, as well as two documentaries in both languages.
On the radio side, the Public Radio Exchange and NCME are curating a playlist of education-related pieces; PRX has also contracted with Connecticut Public Radio to produce an hourlong special featuring former NPR correspondent Andrea Seabrook as host. It airs Sept. 22, the same day as WNET’s telethon.
And American Graduate seeded StoryCorpsU, a yearlong high-school curriculum based on the popular oral-history project. It’s being tested now in urban classrooms in St. Louis, New York City and Washington, D.C.
American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen reaches deeply into the core of public broadcasting’s mission to produce content and educational services that engage and empower citizens to identify problems in their communities and come together to solve them.
“It’s heartening to have organizations come to us saying, ‘We hear you’re doing this, can we get on board?’” said Lee Solonche, director of educational media services at Vegas PBS. “They are knocking on our door to get in on this.”
More High School Students Passing Exit Exam
San Francisco Chronicle
August 23, 2012
Written by: Jill Tucker
The vast majority of the class of 2012 – 95 percent of the state’s 450,000 seniors – passed the California High School Exit Exam by graduation day, an all-time-high pass rate, according to results released Wednesday.
Not surprisingly, state education officials celebrated the news, noting steady improvement from the 90 percent pass rate in 2006, the first year students were required to pass the math and English test in order to graduate.
“When 95 percent of California students are hitting the mark – despite the tremendous challenges we face and the work we still have to do – there’s an awful lot going right in our public schools,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson.
Yet critics of the Exit Exam have long questioned whether passing the test is anything to celebrate.
The exam, which was adopted by the Legislature in 1999, tests students on eighth- or ninth-grade math and 10th-grade English skills. Students are first required to take the exam in their sophomore year and have several chances to pass it.
Over the years, the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars administering the test as well as providing remediation, tutoring and test preparation to ensure students who graduate meet minimum standards.
And yet the Exit Exam isn’t much of a gatekeeper. Relatively few students who didn’t pass would have graduated anyway because they didn’t finish required coursework.
In San Francisco, for example, 109 of the district’s 4,058 high school seniors were denied a diploma in the spring solely because they had not passed the Exit Exam.
And those students were eligible to take the test again after their senior year. Those results were not available.
In other words, the Exit Exam is costly, measures early high school skills on a multiple-choice test, and the vast majority of students pass it.
Is it worth the time, energy and money?
Behind "An American Graduate" Album
BAVC Blog
August 14, 2012
Written by: Chris Runde
Since March of this year, musicians and filmmakers in BAVC’s Next Gen youth programs have been contributing to a nationwide project focusing on the high school dropout crisis in the United States. Supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, American Graduate is a public media initiative created in response to the staggering 1.3 million young people who drop out of high school each year. The project engages with 68 public broadcasting stations and 300 community partners throughout the country to create locally-based solutions and media content.
Working in partnership with KQED, youth from BAVC’s Factory and BUMP Records programs were recruited to create work that documents the state of the American educational system as experienced by the students in it. Artists in BUMP Records recently completed a compilation of music that explores the complexity of the situation in Oakland, California. Touching on topics like the links between education level and income/incarceration, student alienation, and the challenges faced by teachers working in the system, the songs approach difficult subject matter with nuance and honesty. The album, An American Graduate, can be downloaded for free at BUMP Records’ Bandcamp site: http://bumprecords.bandcamp.com/
In support of the album release and larger project goals, BUMP artists Bhindi G, JustKidding and 3ss3ns3 performed a short selection of songs from An American Graduate on Saturday, August 18 at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.
Visit: KQED’s Sound Cloud site to listen to the album.
Video: Attend & Achieve Back-to-School Rally 2012
Video: Attend and Achieve Back-to-School Rally 2012 Part 1
Radio Forum: Investing in Youth of Color
Originally aired August 10, 2012
California must reduce the barriers to success for youth of color, according to a new report assessing the bleak prospects facing Latino and African-American boys and young men in the state. These groups make up a disproportionate share of prisoners, school dropouts and the unemployed. We’ll discuss the report, which offers policy ideas for improving the lives of young people of color.
Host: Joshua Johnson
Guests:
- Jorge Ruiz de Velasco, director of education law and policy at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the UC Berkeley School of Law and co-author of the report
- Marc Philpart, senior associate at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity
- Michael Muscadine, contributed testimony to California Assembly’s Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color
- Rigo “Bubba” Fuentes, contributed testimony to California Assembly’s Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color
- Sandre Swanson, California state assemblymember and head of the Select Subcommittee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color, which released the draft
Video:In Middle School, Can Data Prevent Dropouts?
Frontline/PBS NewsHour
July 17, 2012
Seven thousand students dropout of school every day in the U.S.
And some researchers have dubbed middle school as the essential “make-or-break” years in determining a child’s success.
Tuesday’s “Frontline,” tells the story of how one school in New York City’s Bronx neighborhood is using new data in an effort to “predict and prevent dropouts before they happen.” The effort aims to flag early warning signs in students long before they ever step foot in high school.
Six Great Online Games for Summer Learning
Mind/Shift Blog
August 3, 2012
Written By Almetria Vaba
Summer can be a great opportunity to leverage a child’s interest in specific subjects, like science or history, with their fascination for digital games. PBS Learning Media, launched a year ago, has a robust collection of free interactive games to experiment, manipulate, and investigate.
Stiff Competition in Oakland’s School Board Races
Education Blog
August 5, 2012
Written By Katy Murphy
Two years ago, I wrote about how few people were running for school board in Oakland. It’s much different this year. Below is a list of 13 candidates that have announced at some point that they were running for seats 1, 3, 5, or 7. I’ve learned of a number of new candidates since my blog post in late May.
Friday, Aug. 10 is the filing deadline. You can see for yourself who’s supporting whom and who’s filed on the City of Oakland’s online campaign portal. If you want to see all the filings, select “search filings by date.”
Read about who is running>>