My guest today is Rob Nelson, a political activist who works on behalf of Right To Succeed, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization that has launched its “Drop 50” campaign, which aims to cut school dropout rates throughout Los Angeles and the nation at large.
Glazov: Rob Nelson, thanks for joining me.
I would like to talk to you today about Rahm Emanuel’s recent stated plan on passing a law that punishes kids who drop out of school. This is a subject very close to your heart and to the purpose of your organization, which I would also like to let our readers get familiar with. First things first, tell us about Emanuel’s proposed idea and what you think about it.
Nelson: First, thanks for doing this interview, Jamie.
Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel has issued a seven-page education plan in which he’s proposing a law that immediately revokes the driver’s license of any student who drops out of high school. OK, these kids are already in jeopardy. They’re already at risk of having limited abilities to contribute to society, so now you want to take away their driver’s licenses? Now you want to make them even more incapable of having a job or being productive? It’s absurd. And it completely misses the mark of what the real problem is.
First of all, kids drop out for so many reasons. It’s a terrible choice obviously, but that we’ve let our dropout rates get so high is our failure more than the kids’. The real problem is that the schools are failing the kids, not the other way around.
Does Rahm Emanuel really think his strategy will change anything or get to the root of the problem? Does he think that when half your kids are dropping out of school that if you take away their driver’s licenses, they’ll all suddenly stay or come back? It’s really out of touch with the problem.
How about this instead? How about taking some leadership and instead of penalizing the kids further for a system that is clearly failing them, take real action to reform the system itself, starting by taking our Right To Succeed Drop 50 Pledge and making a public commitment to cut Chicago’s nearly 50 percent dropout rate in half. That’s the right thing for the mayor-elect to do: to hold himself publicly accountable to a meaningful and measurable outcome of school performance, rather than punishing those whose individual failure is essentially proof of a system-wide failure and of a public-school system in serious need of reform.
Glazov: OK, so let’s get to your Right To Succeed Drop 50 Pledge and your campaign. But first, let our readers know about the dropout rate in American high schools. How many high-school students actually graduate?
Nelson: Well the reason this issue is staring us in the face is that school dropout rates is one of the biggest problems in America today. Los Angeles has the second worst graduation rate in the U.S. Almost 60 percent of kids drop out. That’s right, only 40 percent of kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District graduate from high school. California on the whole isn’t much better, with a 40 percent dropout rate. And that’s not counting kids who drop out before high school. Believe it or not, the Department of Education estimates that around 9 percent of kids drop out in middle school. So when you add it all up, the average dropout rate in American public schools is around 40 percent.
Glazov: What are some of the causes of this disaster? How does it harm our culture and society?
Nelson: Think of it this way. If current trends continue, 15 years from now we will see an America in which 75 percent of its citizens don’t have the education or life skills to support themselves and contribute productively to society. It’s a looming tragedy of immeasurable proportions.
Think about it. Most won’t be able hold a meaningful job. Most will be essentially illiterate. Where do they end up? Prison. On welfare. On the streets. Drug addicts. They’re dead weight.
Who pays for these people? The remaining 25 percent. That’s why this is more than just a humanitarian issue. I believe every kid deserves a chance to succeed in life in this country, and I think we are failing the vast majority and making all kinds of excuses. But beyond that, it’s pure self-interest. You can only wall yourself off so much. You can be a multi-millionaire and live in the best gated community there is, but this problem will eventually affect you, your kids and your future. It will drag our country down if we don’t turn it around.
As for the causes, there’s so much blame to go around. And there’s been endless finger pointing and not enough taking responsibility to fix the problem. But if I were to go to some root causes, I’d say there’s both systemic and attitudinal reasons. Systemically, we’ve let our public education systems turn into these huge, territorial bureaucracies where the best interests of the kids comes second to the interests of a politician or the union, or the school board even, and the decisions are made from the top down, often poorly and not based on performance, outcomes and merit.
We too often just give up on kids. We tolerate mediocre schools, ineffective teaching and administration rather than demanding and creating great schools, which by the way exist even in some of the worst neighborhoods in America. We tell kids they’re likely to fail, rather than force them to aim high and realize that no matter where they come from, what obstacles they may have had and will have to overcome, that they can succeed if they are willing to do the work to get there.
Glazov: So what is the The Drop 50 campaign’s mission?
Nelson: We are challenging all elected and appointed non-federal officials, as well as candidates for office, to take a pledge to reduce the dropout rate in their respective communities by 50 percent over the next five years. It’s essentially an accountability pledge. We’re not telling how they have to get there, although we’re more than happy to, but just that they need to get the job done, however in their leadership capacity they see best fit. That is after all why they’re “leaders,” right? So we want them on record with a public commitment not to vague outlines like improved schools or better teachers or this or that, but to a bottom line result: a 50 percent reduction in the school dropout rate.
Driven locally and connected to the nationwide movement, Drop 50 provides the accountability that communities need to demand of their public officials. And I think it can create a powerful nationwide coalition in support of true educational reform.
And let me say something here, we’ve focused too long on the wrong thing: an obsession with test scores. But dropout rates are the single most measurable result of performance, much more than test scores. Because at the end of the day, if nearly half of our kids are dropping out of school, our education system is failing, even if the other half are scoring off the charts on standardized tests. Imagine if FedEx delivered half of its packages on time and to the right location, but the other half were not just late, they never arrived. It would be considered a total and complete failure. That’s what we’re looking at in our schools today, and that’s why we need to focus on graduating kids and cutting the dropout rate more than focusing on who has the highest test scores.
The Drop 50 Pledge can be both a means for public officials to rally support for tough choices or to take on people in the way, or it can be a way to pressure a recalcitrant public official to step up to get the job done or make way for someone who can and will. The situation in Chicago with Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel is a case in point. It seems the mayor-elect wants to blame and punish the kids who drop out of school rather than take responsibility for fixing the problem. The Drop 50 Pledge is the perfect tool for a Chicago-based, citizen-led movement to turn that around and put pressure on him to publicly commit to a bottom-line performance measure that holds the whole system accountable and to results, not just the kids alone. Parents, teachers, students, community leaders can strike back and say, “OK, you can take away these kids’ licenses for dropping out, kind of blaming the victims, or you could step up and take the pledge to commit to cutting the dropout rate in half.”
Glazov: In terms of strategies, you are creating public discussions, getting elected officials involved and also starting to implement real change in local schools. Tell us about these and other efforts and how they are going.
Nelson: Look, I’m not going to pretend that fixing America’s broken public schools is going to be a walk in the park, but at the same time, it’s not rocket science. First we have to realize that the problems we keep pointing at, unions, lack of parental involvement, over-sized classes, not enough money, may matter, but they’re obstacles, not reasons why we can’t fix our schools.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula, but great public and charter schools have been created across America. I think people need to see these schools and then create them in their own communities. Right to Succeed is working to help 6,600 communities discover and build 15,000 of these amazing schools in communities over the next five years. That’s a serious start. And it can be done.
I’m on the advisory board of a LAUSD school in downtown Los Angeles. It’s called the LA School of Global Studies. It’s a public school, with union teachers. The kids are 90 percent Latino, and 90 percent of them come from low-income families. They struggle with all the problems of growing up and living in an urban inner city. Now here’s the amazing part: The school has a 90 percent graduation rate. There is no bullying – there’s bullying everywhere even in the best communities and richest schools – not here. It’s a community, where the teachers, the administrator, the students and increasingly the parents join together and set high expectations for themselves and one another. They hold each other accountable and it works.
I’d like to take you Jaime, and any “change-maker” readers you have who are interested in helping advance this cause, on a tour of this school. Because when you see this school in action, you get it. And you see that this could work anywhere in America.
Glazov: Educate us about the Drop50Pledge.org website and what people who want to make a change in LA’s and the nation’s high-school drop-out rate can do.
Nelson: I see Drop 50 as a national campaign, but community by community driven. And each community is going to face different obstacles, have different needs and solutions and ultimately have its own best way to achieve the goal. So what I want is to get as many different communities on board this campaign. For starters, I want people to go after their mayor, governor, city council members, school-board members and superintendant, local school union leaders and get each of them to take the pledge. In addition, I want individual citizens, not just public officials, to take it as well, making a symbolic commitment to help get this goal achieved. I’d like to have 10 million take the Drop 50 Pledge. We’d get the job done that way.
The website has a place for digital signatures. In the case of public officials, we want them to take it digitally, send us a copy and then issue a press release and start talking about their commitment whenever they can, as well as start getting other officials in their community on board. By the way, it can be a great campaign tool. You’re trying to unseat an incumbent or hold off a challenger – take the pledge. Use it to get votes.
You can also visit the Right To Succeed website to see other initiatives we have going on. We’re looking to create chapters across America. We hosted our first “get real” town hall meeting in Dallas last month. Grammy award winner Patty Austin co-hosted it with us and performed. Cool idea, combining music with a town hall on education. We’d like to see them all over the country.
Look, I’m the pied piper here. I want as many people on board for this as possible. I want it to be driven locally, so like I said I’d like to have people interested in starting a chapter to contact us. We need all kinds of support, from financial donations, to services, to publicity and even access to key public officials and business and community leaders across America. Heck, I even want celebrity support because, let’s face it, for better or worse, people listen and I know our message needs to be heard.
Glazov: It is in everyone’s interest that we decrease our young people’s dropout rate, but there is a main appeal to conservatives about what you are doing right? Can you speak on that?
Nelson: Well, as I said before, we’ve let our public-education systems turn into these huge, territorial bureaucracies where the best interests of the kids comes second, where government bureaucrats are making poor decisions that they shouldn’t even be making in the first place at all. It’s why Right To Succeed is all about school choice. Parents, students, families should be deciding what schools are best for them, not the government. And they should have the ability to choose to go to those schools.
I think also it’s what I said before about this being everyone’s problem. We’re all going to pay for the lost productivity and what I called the dead weight of having our next generation be completely without the skills and knowledge, the very basic abilities, to contribute in any meaningful way to society. From a conservative perspective, I say we should invest now in getting these kids a decent education. But again, I’m not saying we need to spend more tax dollars. I’m saying we need to stop doing things the way we are now, wasting huge sums of money and failing. We need to decentralize education so individuals, families, communities are in control, not bureaucracies, bureaucrats and politicians, even at a local level.
I think of this almost like a national security issue. I owe that to a good friend of mine, a die-hard conservative. I kept talking to him about how having half the next generation drop out was such a social and economic nightmare, and he said to me, “Rob, this is a national security issue.” And he’s right. We will fall apart if we don’t turn this around. We won’t be able to sustain our place in the world, our economic competitiveness or our military preparedness if 25 percent of the population is carrying the other 75 percent. It’s simple math.
Glazov: On a personal level, what has inspired you to take up this cause?
Nelson: That’s a great question, Jamie, and not a simple one. I started out in politics as a young political activist in Washington trying to get our national political leadership to stop selling out our county’s future and to take a pledge, much like Drop 50 to cut the deficit in half in four years or, get this, quit. We actually got a lot of signatures, an enormous public backing and created some waves. The group was called Lead … or Leave. I ended up with a show on Fox News and then on Fox broadcast. Before I knew it, I was more Hollywood than change-making. I decided I wanted to change that and use my talents, my brain, my energy to try to create the social and political change in this country that I think many of us agree needs to happen. Right to Succeed was a perfect organization for me, and when I first visited LA School of Global Studies, I was all in.
It’s kind of a full circle for me. When I lived in D.C. and was fighting my deficit war, I became a mentor through a remedial tutoring program. One kid in particular became like a little brother to me. It’s a long story, but basically he lived in one of the worst housing projects in D.C. and was heading for a really bad life. I intervened, made him part of my life and he began to change. His mother actually wanted me to adopt him at one point, but I wasn’t ready to go there. And then he was killed in a car accident, hanging out with the wrong people, doing the wrong things.
I don’t consider myself responsible for his death, but I made a commitment to myself in his memory to do through my life things to help change that destiny for other kids, less fortunate than I was. I’m back to doing that, and I’m dragging anyone and everyone I can get to help me. Because it is not too late to turn this thing around. But it’s going to take all of us.
Glazov: Rob Nelson, thank you for joining us today. And thank you for your valiant effort on behalf of our young people and our country as a whole. We wish you the best of luck.
We encourage all of our readers to help make a change and visit the Right To Succeed website or get in touch with Rob Nelson.
Jamie Glazov is editor of Frontpagemag.com and author of “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.”
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