Step by step.

Step by step. We all know the first step to overcoming a problem is to admit there is a problem. Consider school officials, and especially those leading some of the largest urban districts, to be on step one in their fight against dropouts. In rapid succession recently, we've seen several large districts admit that dropouts are a major problem. Houston started, grudgingly. In July, the Texas Education Agency investigated claims that dropouts in the Houston Independent School District The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the largest public school system in Texas and the seventh-largest in the United States.[1] Houston ISD serves as a community school district for most of the city of Houston and several nearby and insular municipalities. went unreported. It examined the records of about 5,500 students who had left 16 Houston schools in 2000-01 without graduating. The state agency found that almost 3,000 of them should have been counted as dropouts, but were not. A New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times editorial called on Secretary of Education (and former Houston school superintendent Noun 1. school superintendent - the superintendent of a school systemoverseer, superintendent - a person who directs and manages an organization Rod Paige Roderick Raynor "Rod" Paige (born June 17, 1933), served as the 7th United States Secretary of Education from 2001 to 2005. Paige, who grew up in Mississippi, built a career on a belief that education equalizes opportunity, moving from college dean and school superintendent to be to explain the discrepancies. Paige defended his former district's accomplishments, but did admit to the Times "there probably was" a dropout (1) On magnetic media, a bit that has lost its strength due to a surface defect or recording malfunction. If the bit is in an audio or video file, it might be detected by the error correction circuitry and either corrected or not, but if not, it is often not noticed by the human problem in Houston. New York City New York City:see New York, city. New York CityCity (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. Chancellor Joel I. Klein addressed his city's dropout problem, after avoiding comment on the issue for two months. "The problem of what's happening to students is a tragedy," he told the Times, referring to a system where students were pushed out of school once they fell behind in high school work. "It's not just a few instances; it's a real issue." And in this month's Administrator Profile (p. 19), Dallas Superintendent Mike Moses admits his district is starting to confront its own dropout problem. The big question in these districts is how to fix the problem. I think Klein summed up the important second step: "The information [about dropouts] should be out there and it should be clear. You're never going to change the system unless you're brutally honest." In New York City, and apparently Houston too, one glitch A temporary or random hardware malfunction. It is possible that a bug in a program may cause the hardware to appear as if it had a glitch in it and vice versa. At times it can be extremely difficult to determine whether a problem lies within the hardware or the software. See glitch attack. was in how students who leave school are classified. Both systems appear to be unnecessarily complicated; Houston is studying how to create a single definition of dropout. Admitting there is a problem and quantifying that problem are the first two necessary steps in a process where the last step--actually fixing the problem--is by far the hardest challenge.