In 8th grade, I did not understand terms like dropout or school push-out. I didn’t know that there was a vocabulary or a movement to address what I saw in my middle school or high school: a lot of my friends did not graduate with me; life became too complicated for some of my peers and it appeared that school wasn’t providing any solutions to help them in their life or education so they gave up.
I was a fortunate exception. As a first-generation immigrant, I spent the first few years of elementary school struggling to absorb English so I could learn. However, as soon as I could speak English, the Los Angeles Unified School District labeled me highly gifted. But while I attended a highly gifted magnet program in middle school, I watched my peers struggling with lack of support and punitive discipline, in spite of their intelligence and potential.
[For more of this story, written by Lisa Higuera, go to http://edsource.org/2015/we-ca...gling-students/82883]
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