legters

Nettie Legters

Photograph of Nettie Legters
Nettie Legters
Research Scientist,
The Center for Social Organization of Schools
The Johns Hopkins University

Nettie Legters, Ph.D. is a Research Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools, and Co-Director of the Center's Talent Development High Schools (TDHS) program. Her research focuses on equity in education, school organization, teachers' work, dropout prevention, and implementation, scale-up, and impact of secondary education reform.

Dr. Legters has dedicated her professional career to improving low performing high schools and advancing the national high school reform movement. She has published extensively and presented to a wide variety of audiences in national, state, regional, and district forums. She co-authored with Robert Balfanz the widely cited report Locating the Dropout Crisis - Which High Schools Produce the Nation's Dropouts?, Where Are They Located?, Who Attends Them? And her book, Comprehensive Reform for Urban High Schools: A Talent Development Approach is available through Teachers College Press.

<< Back to Ask the Expert Home

Ask the Expert Your Question!

Question 4: Are there any best practices we can learn from other countries for keeping students in school?

Taking a closer look at dropout prevention practices in other countries is on my long list of things to—thanks for pushing it closer to the top. What little I’ve read and learned indicates that engaging and meeting the needs of increasingly diverse learners is a challenge everywhere, not just in the U.S. I’ve also learned that there are parts of solutions emerging everywhere as well, and that the common principles of personalization, flexibility, active and applied pedagogy, community, technology, and multi-agency collaboration run throughout. Reva Klein, a leader in this area, puts it well in a 2002 UNESCO interview: “There are so many pedagogically and psychologically sound approaches being used in diverse corners of the world to engage young people in their learning that not a single spoke of yet another wheel needs to be invented.”

Among others, Klein calls out Denmark’s system where there is no high stakes testing, no grades, strong vocational programs, lots of active pedagogy, and very low dropout rates, and Australia’s multi-agency approach to providing students with academic and social service supports. Klein edits the International Journal of School Disaffection, a product of the International Consortium on School Disaffection. Access to both is found at Clemson’s National Dropout Prevention Center/Network.

Other resources include a 2006 volume edited by Philip Hughes entitled Secondary Education at the Crossroads: International Perspectives Related to the Asia-Pacific Region. It’s a follow on to Lauglo and MacLean’s (2005) Vocalisation of Secondary Education Revisited which explores the pros and cons of the growing emphasis on workforce preparation in secondary education with particular focus on Africa.

On the vocationalism front, it has troubled me that a primary approach to managing diversity at the secondary level has been early streaming of young people into academic and vocational tracks. I spent some time in Germany where this “sorting” occurs prior to high school. I wonder what a secondary education system that truly integrates academic and applied learning rather than privileging one over the other in both status and earnings potential would look like. Perhaps folks out there have images and realities to share that can be sent to the National High School Center.

References

See http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=2103&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html) for the full interview.

For journal see http://www.dropoutprevention.org/resource/journals/journal_contents.php?pubID=30

Grubb, N. W. (1996). New Vocationalism: What it is. What it could be. Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 77.

Disclaimer

It is important to note that the National High School Center does not endorse particular programs or practices.

<< Go Back