Getting Students to Finish High School

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about "Solving Problems by Improving Education," after being inspired by a quote from a Mississippi resident who is participating in our Teach & Inspire Scholarship Program.

The Mississippi resident had written about why they want to become a teacher, saying "In law enforcement I am responsible for taking people to court and incarcerating them. The stories I hear from the prisoners and the testimony I hear presented in court are closely related to education. Without exception, the people have failed to finish high school. I feel strongly that those people could have been saved if they had been encouraged to finish school. Some of them wanted to but had no one to encourage them. I want to teach so I can work with children and hopefully save some of those considering dropping out."

A recent article by Markham Heid in the Washington Examiner ties in nicely with this. Entitled "Stay in school — jail's too pricey," the article talks about the amount of money spent on prisoners vs. students. It makes sense that it costs so much to keep our prisons running, when you take into account all the expenses that come with keeping someone in a facility 24 hours a day. But, as the article points out, "Studies have shown that spending money on education keeps students out of jail later."

The article quotes Miriam Rollin, executive director of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a national organization of law enforcement officials, who says, "There is significant research showing that investing in quality early education programs helps put at-risk children on the right track [and] reduces the likelihood that these children will engage in criminal behavior."

I wouldn't necessarily advocate for doing something from a budget perspective that might make our prisons less secure. But I do think we need to focus more as a society on the fact that investing more in education could result in more students getting a quality education and finishing high school—-and this could result in a much lower prison population down the road, while producing numerous other benefits that come with having a better educated society.

This investment in education need not always come in the form of dollars. It could be about finding more teachers like our candidate from Mississippi, who is driven to keep kids in school and out of prison.

Or it could be about getting more teachers to engage students by showing them how they'll use what they're learning in the real world. I love hearing from some of the career changers who have become certified through our program as they talk about bringing their real world experience and examples to the classroom.

I've met a physics teacher with a PhD in the subject and real experience working in a lab, who is now teaching in South Carolina after becoming certified through our program. Or there is the chemistry major and ABCTE-certified teacher in Florida who takes the material and relates it to subjects that interest her students, like automotives or technology. And we have someone who worked in the field as a biologist in Idaho and Alaska before going through our program. He now brings that real world experience into the science classroom and he even prevented a student from dropping out of school.

Learn more about the ABCTE teaching certification program--which is accepted for public schools in nine states and by some charter and private schools--or ABCTE's Teach & Inspire Scholarship Program, which seeks candidates to teach in high-need schools and subjects in Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina.