Archives for December 2010

Every holiday season I look for a story which tells the story of the season.  Recently the Story of Rose was sent to me.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and  that your have a joyous holiday and a glorious New Year.
The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.

I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being..

She said, ‘Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I’m eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?’

I laughed and enthusiastically responded, ‘Of course you may!’ and she gave me a giant squeeze..

‘Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?’ I asked.

She jokingly replied, ‘I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids…’

‘No seriously,’ I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.

‘I always dreamed of having a college education and now I’m getting one!’ she told me.

After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake.

We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this ‘time machine’ as she shared her wisdom and experience with me..

Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up.

At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I’ll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor.

Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, ‘I’m sorry I’m so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I’ll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know.’

As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, ‘ We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.

There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humour every day. You’ve got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die.

We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it!

There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.

If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don’t do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight.

Anybody! Can grow older. That doesn’t take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change. Have no regrets.

The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets..’

She concluded her speech by courageously singing ‘The Rose.’

She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives. At the year’s end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those months ago.

One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep.

Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it’s never too late to be all you can possibly be.

When you finish reading this, please send this peaceful word of advice to your friends and family, they’ll really enjoy it!

These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.

REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL. We make a Living by what we get. We make a Life by what we give.

God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage. If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.

Three years ago, today, this website went live.  As of today, 240,464 “hits” have been registered.  On average, over 70% are “unique” – people who come to the site for the first time.

What is to me the most amazing part is that while 2/3 are from the US, many come from foreign lands, showing the global nature of the dropout problem. Canada is the country that follows America followed by Morocco, the Philippines, Spain, India,the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Maylaysia, Korea, Brazil, Ireland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Indonesia, France, South Africa and Sweden rounds out the top 20.  Russia is a close #21.

As you would have guessed, the 15 Effective Strategies is the topic which attracts the most people.

Thanks to people who have visited the website, I have delivered workshops in 49 states (not in Alaska) and 9 countries.  I have now written 10 books (#10 will be published in February, 2011).

the 15 strategies  have been translated into Hebrew, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian and Portugesse.

 We are losing too many children who are dropping out.

I post three times a week so you can register to receive regular updates.

Thank you again for your kind words and thoughts.  If there is any topic you wish me to comment on or you wish me to deliver a workshop,  send your request to [email protected]

Eleven winning states and the District of Columbia will split the 3.4 billion dollars dispensed by the U.S. Department of Education as part of “The Race for the Top”educational reform grant.   But what happens to the remaining 18 states that submitted applications but didn’t win any funding?  They went out on a limb

and agreed to increase the number charter schools, agreed to have new evaluations for teachers, adopted new procedures to turning around low-performing schools.  (Before the Race for the Top was announced, five states changed their teacher evaluation laws.  In the last two years, eighteen more states changed their teacher evaluation laws.)  Do the non-winning states continue to accept the proposals they submitted without any federal funding to implement them?  Or do they abandon their reform plans?  Some states have already said they will continue to try to implement their plans as best they can.  Some have pushed back the deadlines for implementation.  But many states are already making severe educational cutbacks because of shortfalls in state revenues.  It seems that while some states were winners in this race, as happens in most races, there are far more losers.

I had the privilege of meeting Matt LaPlante from Nodropouts.org  in Philadelphia.  He sat in one one of the two workshops that I delivered and posted what follows on his website.  It is an excellent website, designed to stop dropouts.  I suggest that you visit.

“The teacher dropout rate in this country is higher than the student dropout rate,” laments Franklin Schargel, author of 162 Keys to School Success. By some estimates as many as 48 percent of teachers won’t survive five years in the classroom, Schargel said.

But it’s not the kids that are driving teachers away, Schargel said.

“The number one reason teachers give for leaving is administration,” said Schargel, who spent 30 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator in New York City. “They’re not getting the support they’ve been told to expect.”

One major reason for that, he said, is that teachers don’t demand to be treated as professionals. For one thing, he said, teachers are given scant credit for what they bring to the educational table.

The best way to tell which students are going to succeed in college, he noted, is to look at which ones succeeded in high school.

“Teachers are the best predictors of success,” Schargel says. “The SAT and ACT are not.”

But when our nation wants to measure how well students have been educated, do we trust the teachers to tell us? “No,” Schargel says, “we give them tests.”

Of course, that’s not going to change anytime soon, but Schargel said that there are many things administrators can do to treat teachers as professionals “” from printing business cards to encouraging everyone to hang their credentials on the wall to putting teachers in charge of observing and accessing their colleagues.

And finally, he said, teachers need to be given every opportunity possible to succeed “” by changing the culture of schools to resemble a family.

“And families,” he said, “don’t let their members fail.”

Schargel’s website is copyright free “” and he encourages visitors to borrow liberally from material posted there.

A new report issued by the America’s Promise founded by Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and his wife, Alma says that the United States graduation rate is rising.  But the report doesn’t satisfy the critics of public education. Schools have a long distance to go, but the report sees where the schools are compared to where they were.  I would like to quote from the report:

The number of dropout factory high schools fell by 261, from a high of 2,007 such schools in 2002 to 1,746 schools in 2008. This 13 percent decline is important, given that these schools produce half of the nation’s dropouts every year.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the national graduation rate increased from 72 to 75 percent between 2001 and 2008. An additional 120,000 students earned a high school diploma in the Class of 2008 compared to the

Class of 2001.

Tennessee and New York led the nation in boosting high school graduation rates, with breakthrough gains of 15 and 10 percentage-points, respectively. Ten other states had gains ranging from about 4 to 7 percentage-points. These gains were in states that had graduation rates in 2002 that were above, near, and below the national graduation rate, indicating that improvement is possible regardless of starting point.

More than half of the nation’s states “” 29 in total “” increased high school graduation rates. Eighteen states had rates that remained essentially the same, and three states “” Arizona, Nevada, and Utah “” experienced noticeable declines in their graduation rates.

The rate of progress over the last decade “” 3 percentage- points “”  is too slow to reach the national goal of having 90 percent of students graduate from high school and obtain at least one year of postsecondary schooling or training by 2020. Over the next 10 years, the nation will need to accelerate its progress in boosting high school graduation rates fivefold from the rates achieved through 2008.”

The 88-page report, “Building a Grad Nation,” was published by America’s Promise Alliance, along with two other groups.”

A new report issued by the America’s Promise founded by Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and his wife, Alma says that the United States graduation rate is rising.

The report cites two statistics. The national graduation rate increased to 75 percent in 2008, from 72 percent in 2001. And the number of high schools that researchers call dropout factories “” where less than 60% of entering students graduate-declined to about 1,750 in 2008, from about 2,000 such schools in 2002.