Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Opinion Mixed on Bumping Up Drop-out Age, 05/14/07
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june07/dropout_5-14.html

Initiating Questions:

1. When is it legal to drop out of school in your state?

2. Why do you think students drop out of school?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What are some states doing to keep students from dropping out of school?

In an effort to encourage more young people to earn their high school diplomas, states across the country are raising the age that kids can elect to drop out of school from 16 to 18.

2. What are some challenges that educators face if a state raises the dropout age?

It takes more money, more time, and more teachers to deal with discipline problems, truancy problems, and to develop programs that keep the most disinterested students engaged.

"If kids don't want to be there, they have the propensity to act out and take away from the kids who do want to learn," said Leanne Winner, spokeswoman for the North Carolina School Board Association.

3. Why were the laws on school attendance established to allow a 16-year-old the right to drop out of school?

The laws on school attendance were established when the United States depended more on farm and factory labor, at a time when children were often expected to leave school at an early age in order to work and provide income for themselves or their families.

4. What disadvantages do drop outs face?

"This idea that dropping out at 16 makes any sense is really decades out of date," Indiana Republican state Representative Luke Messer, who is pushing his state to retain students, told the Christian Science Monitor. "In today's world, if you don't have a high school diploma you're setting yourself up for failure."

Dropouts statistically make less money and are more likely to receive government assistance or to go to jail.

5. Why do students typically drop out of school?

According to a report by the Christian Science Monitor last year, the No. 1 reason that students drop out is because they find school boring.

"I think I dropped out of high school just cause I was really bored in my classes. Like, some teachers were really great, you know, they were funny; they talked to me like I was a friend, rather than talk down to me," Fallon O'Hagan, 21, who dropped out in the ninth grade, told the audience at the National Summit on America's Silent Dropout Epidemic, held in Washington, D.C., in early May.

Others who dropped out said they found the lessons are not relevant to the lives they live.

6. Why do some critics object to raising the legal dropout age to 18?

Jack Wuest, executive director of the Alternative Schools Network, a group that runs education programs in inner-city Chicago, argued that laws increasing the dropout age to 18 do nothing to solve the real problems that are facing kids who are leaving school.

"It doesn't change what the kids are going through day to day. They've got boyfriend problems, gang problems, homelessness," Wuest said.

"They're in limbo -- they don't drop out because they're forced out. They just leave. The law really doesn't do much. It doesn't change anything for the kids on the street," he added.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. What do you think? Look at the benefits and challenges of raising the age that kids can elect to drop out of school from 16 to 18. What recommendations would you make to the education leaders in your state? Explain your reasoning.

2. Some educators advocate creating a national system that accurately counts and tracks who is graduating from high school in this country. What are the challenges to creating such a system? Why might some educators resist creating such a system? What are the benefits of creating it?

3. Some educators say that students who don't want to be in school distract from those who do. What do you think? What should school systems do to create positive learning environments for all students?

4. Look at some of the research that compares the lives of high school drop outs in this country to those who graduate. What trends do you see?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.