Factory-model schools produce many dropouts. Actually, they’re designed to do so. Factories eliminate product failures, in this case disaffected students, as early in the process as possible, in the service of efficiency. Until these schools cease to be educational assembly lines, dropouts should come as no big surprise.

In a report called “Locating the Dropout Crisis,” researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that 1 in 5 high schools in the U.S. graduates fewer than 60 percent of their students. One in 10 schools graduates fewer than 50 percent. The press dubbed these schools “dropout factories.” But the Industrial Age language is no mere metaphor.

Factory-model schools are soul-killers for students and teachers alike. They manufacture student disaffection. And they burn the teachers to a crisp.

At the dawn of the 20th century, educators were faced with a huge influx of children from foreign-immigrant families and families coming to the cities from farmlands. Educators turned to America’s signature dynamo at the time, the factory, after which they modeled America’s comprehensive secondary schools.

Critically important to public-school designers at the time was judicious use of tax dollars. Spending public money on other people’s children was, and still is, a dicey thing to do. Educators could not justify spending money on frills like the leafy campuses, broad course-offerings or personal attention that characterized private schools for the well-to-do. Inefficiency was not an option, because it would threaten the whole project of educating a democratic citizenry.

The solution, as expressed by Ellwood P. Cubberly, an early 20th-century historian of education, was to create “scientific” schools that would be “factories in which the raw materials [children] are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”

High schools and junior highs — the latter were invented around 1910 — put students on a self-propelled conveyer belt that moves from classroom to classroom to get a rivet of English, a bolt-tightening of math, and so forth. To improve efficiency, schools sorted students into “tracks,” grouped according to their economic prospects — college, general, vocational. The final product at the end of the line was an educated student, which in today’s terms means acceptable test scores.

Teachers were expected to die-press curriculum into the kids. Teachers busy operating educational die-presses are not empowered to solve problems with kids, let alone deal with bad policies or ineffective curricula. Industrial-model schools have no mechanism for capitalizing on teachers’ creativity or ideas for improving school quality.

Teachers had more students in the past than they do today, but even now they tend to have 125 students each semester — 5 classes of 25 each. There is no time in the day to stop the assembly line to get to know any of them personally. If a kid’s not listening or he’s being disruptive, the teacher can’t stop a class with a “Whoa, what’s up with you today? Let’s talk.”

She teaches the kids who are listening and tries as she can to bring the others along. If the disruptive kid gets to be too much, he goes to the assistant principal’s office where he is punished into compliance. Repeated punishments encourage kids to drop out, but schools must enforce rules to maintain smooth assembly-line procedures.

Older factory-model schools sent disruptive or “retarded” children home. Even now, such schools don’t investigate why a kid is acting out.

A guidance counselor might ask personal questions, but few schools collaborate with family-service organizations to work with the homes and communities whence many problems come.

So the factory keeps on churning, even though the model does not produce good results. Tinkering with it has not helped much, although the dropout rate is certainly better today than in 1950, when it was 52 percent.

For decades, teachers have consistently reported on surveys that their number-one source of satisfaction in teaching is student achievement. Teachers put compensation second, at best. They enjoy inspiring successful test scores, but even more gratifying to them is the ah-ha look in a kid’s eye. (See Tinkering Toward Utopia, by David Tyack and Larry Cuban.)

Therefore, the solution to “dropout factories” is to give teachers what they want: successful students. To do that, we’ll have to dismantle the factories. Teachers need far more opportunity to see the ah-ha, and that will mean stopping the assembly line, so they can get to know a smaller group of kids. Focusing some time and resources on building the connective tissue between teachers and kids will finally ease us away from our blue-collar, industrial-production-model schools — which were never a good idea for young human beings in the first place. With humans instead of organizational machinery in charge, schools will become productive places to teach and learn.

Teachers are not to blame for the organization of the building into which they were hired. True, many cling to their blue-collar unions, also stuck in the Industrial Age. But it is policymakers — district administrators, unions and politicians — who are entirely responsible for allowing these dropout factories to persist. Name and shame them instead.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.