The wisdom of two education giants

The state panel said the right things about the crisis of 10,000 students dropping out each year. It acknowledged that raising the compulsory age will “only retain a handful of students’’ unless the state offers “programs and services that address the underlying reasons that students drop out of school.’’

Whether such programs are forthcoming is uncertain. There were no specific cost estimates or recommendations for funding this level of student retention, even though everyone knows it is far cheaper to educate a youth than incarcerate one. It is one thing for the commission to declare, “In these dire economic times, we cannot afford to be complacent . . . we will solve the dropout crisis by ensuring that every child has the supports and opportunities he or she needs to succeed in school and beyond.’’

It is another to end the complacency that nakedly exposes the lack of support thus far offered. The report cited how the state has slashed the fund for alternative education programs from $1.2 million a year from 2004 through 2009 to $200,000 in fiscal year 2010. “Even before this cut,’’ the report said, “demand and need far outstripped the availability of these grant funds. As noted previously, alternative education programs in Massachusetts currently serve only one quarter of the approximately 12,000 at-risk students who could potentially benefit from such programs.’’

Sizer, who was 77, was involved in education from the ivory tower of Harvard to founding a coalition of small schools that includes several Boston public pilot schools. He likely would have said the retention is possible only if teachers have the chance to make a connection. In 1996, he said to the Christian Science Monitor, “Is there a teacher who knows my youngster well enough to write a good college reference? The answer in a lot of schools is no.’’

In expressing how it was possible to adopt the assumption that all students can succeed against a fatalistic acceptance at the outset of the school year that a certain percentage will fail, he recalled to USA Today in 1996 about the time that he was called upon as a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Army to train new soldiers how to fire weapons.

“Nobody said, ‘Well, some of them don’t test well,’ ’’ Sizer said. “There wasn’t an assumption that some can’t learn. It was: ‘Lieutenant, I give you an order.’ I watched semiliterate dropouts whose home language wasn’t English take off like rockets and become superb people.’’

Bracey, who was 69, probably would have complemented Sizer’s passion for classroom intimacy with a call to stop teaching to the test. The longtime policy critic and former analyst for the National Education Association said of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind, “If 2000 was the year that testing went crazy, 2001 was the year it went stark raving mad . . . What say we take a moment to consider a few of the personal qualities that standardized tests do not measure: creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, humor, reliability, enthusiasm, civic-mindedness, self-awareness, self-discipline, empathy, leadership, and compassion.’’

Bracey was also well known in education circles for bipartisan skewering of politicians, including President Obama, and media coverage for painting public schools as so bad that no one wants to actually help them. In one of his last contributions in September to the education policy magazine Phi Delta Kappan, Bracey said, “Americans never hear anything positive about the nation’s schools and haven’t since the years before Sputnik in 1957.’’

It should serve as a warning to Massachusetts if it really does raise the legal dropout age. Sizer told The Boston Globe in 1996, it should be no surprise that students drop out of “big, standardized, mechanized’’ schools. The surprise will be when we stop delivering such schools to the students.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.