The Teacher of the Year for 2009, Anthony Mullen, spent 21 years as a New York City police officer before starting a second career as a special education teacher working with the kind of would-be tough kids he once arrested. He hopes to focus on lowering the dropout rate by encouraging options. Teacher Magazine has a great interview with Mullen, who’s focusing on dropout prevention.
It’s important that every student gets an academic background, but we’ve lost vocational education. Most of our high schools are geared towards getting students into college. And yet we have this population of students—millions of students, literally—who want to do what our ancestors have done for thousands of years: They want to work with their hands. They don’t want to sit in a desk all day. They want to build, they want to create, they want to design. And we’re losing that because we’re so concerned that they take the extra science, the extra math, the extra history and all these things to go to college when all these vocational opportunities are passing them by.
Speaking of cops in the classroom, Los Angeles is seeing high graduation rates at its police-affiliated magnet schools, reports City Journal. Most students come from low-income Hispanic families.
Discipline is strict, a communal priority. Reseda organizes cadets into squads of five to eight, each supervised by a student leader. The leaders make sure that their cadets get their work done, keep their grades up, behave in class, and dress neatly.
So far, few graduates have gone on to become police officers, perhaps because there’s a three- to four-year gap between high school and eligibility to join the force.