Education Post
“If we have to remove dead weight, we will remove dead weight.” That’s what the assistant principal of Chicago’s Orr High School told me in 1998, when I asked him how he dealt with no-show students. What he meant was, they’d be dropped from the school rolls and handed a list of alternative schools to call.
As both an education reporter and a former alternative school teacher, I found it shocking to hear an administrator so blatantly dismiss any young person. Yet at the same time, I well knew how few adults in city high schools really knew—and sometimes, how few really cared to know—the specific challenges of individual students’ lives and how to help them stay in school...
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