{"id":2267,"date":"2010-08-13T22:34:33","date_gmt":"2010-08-14T02:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2267"},"modified":"2010-08-13T22:34:33","modified_gmt":"2010-08-14T02:34:33","slug":"students-dont-exit-on-inflatable-slides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2267","title":{"rendered":"Students don’t exit on inflatable slides"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite all the jokes this week about Steven Slater, there’s something important about his exit from his flight-attendant job: he left the way he dreamed. Not gracefully, and not with a happy ending, but with the drama he may have imagined.<\/p>\n

In many ways, Slater’s exit is close to the stereotype of the high school graduate that became popular in the 1960s: a self-indulgent male who has no self-discipline and doesn’t understand the long-term consequences of his actions. In my 1996 book Creating the Dropout<\/a> I trace the development of the stereotype, which didn’t exist in the 1950s, or at least not connected to dropping out (though it existed in media portrayals of “the delinquent”). Slater’s spectacular slide out of his job is unlike the reality of dropping out, generally a change of status that is the accumulation of attrition rather than a dramatic break in status. What’s the difference between 15% attendance and none? Or between someone who left school for a few months and came back who is thinking of leaving and the same person a day later who will not be coming back? <\/p>\n

We don’t really have a clear way of thinking about this process other than the common-sense recognition that the end of attachment to school attendance is a complex process. But that’s not of much use to teachers and principals when it’s happening: “Hi, you’re in the middle of a complex process. It’s been nice knowing you.” Much academic research focuses on distinctions between the obvious end states: graduation or non-graduation after attendance has clearly ended. There are regular attempts to predict those “at risk” of dropping out, and those efforts are fraught with difficulties, from sensitivity\/specificity errors to excusing dropout-to-GED paths to focusing on the individual and ignoring context. <\/p>\n

I’m afraid I don’t have any clear answers to the complexity involved, just an awareness that Slater’s exit is almost the adolescent fantasy that Fred and George Weasley’s was, and that we still don’t have a good way of thinking about the reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite all the jokes this week about Steven Slater, there’s something important about his exit from his flight-attendant job: he left the way he dreamed. Not gracefully, and not with a happy ending, but with the drama he may have imagined. In many ways, Slater’s exit is close to the stereotype of the high school […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-research"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Az","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2269,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions\/2269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}