Probably everyone already knows the solution to the high school dropout problem is _not_ a new program. Our schools have spent outrageous sums for _new programs_ purportedly guaranteed to solve various problems, and teachers have spent untold hours implementing these programs with nearly zero results. Last week the new Collier Chief Instructional Officer Martha Hayes ordered me to cease and desist immediately my proven-by-ten-years of experience safety-net optional extra-credit program of attending a play or lecture at the Phil or of donating classical books to our Lely English Department to provide class sets for future students. Our new modus operandi: money, any amount for any purpose, may not be connected in any way to grades. Curriculum and instruction may not vary from school to school or course to course. Everybody on the same page all the time. Even the air conditioning in each classroom must be controlled from the MLK building. And everything must be directed toward improving FCAT scores. Many students unable by family situation or natural gifts to achieve good grades in English used my safety net and experienced the Phil for the first time or learned significant titles of classical literature, how to order books both from bookstores and online according to ISBN numbers and learned that contributing to the benefit of future students was worth so much that it boosted their grades by 10%. Cost, about $12. And it didn’t come out of taxpayers pockets. Now sensitivity to grades has caused the firing of a superintendent. Now teachers and administrators are under grand pressure to obey the letter of the law. Now students' well-being and survival in school is cut out in numbers and dried on the automatic delicate cycle by people who haven't spent much time with flesh and blood adolescents but lots and lots of time with computers and Data Warehouse. Today my son who resurrected our LHS auditorium's light and sound system after 8 years of disuse had his wiring and technical improvements heartlessly ripped out by technicians who know nearly nothing about the equipment or the students' work. Three speakers he had laboriously modified for our upcoming _Macbeth_ performance were taken out of the school and an unsigned sign left saying: Do not touch! These technicians in fact, made serious electrical mistakes like daisy-chaining surge protectors fused for 15 amps with 60 amps of equipment. Imagine what that does to a student's self-esteem, to his desire to continue to graduation. He tried hard not to let me see, but he cried all the way home, 20 miles. It isn't always the dumb students who drop out. Micromanaging the classroom to the extent of altering my syllabus which includes this option is not helping to keep my freshmen in school. Neither is holding their hands and sympathizing with them about mean old teachers who insist on grading them according to proven standards. Neither is taking their class time for presentations by Herff Jones, hypnotists, lawyers and policemen. Consistency and having real information about actual texts that are the best that have been thought and written are the keys to good teaching, and that is the key to keeping students enrolled until graduation. How to keep students in school? Make the learning environment real--not artificially pumped-up by and directed toward FCAT. If anything worthwhile is going on in school, it happens between a student and a text. Focus on that. Protect that. Having administrators quantifying everything and micromanaging teaching methods are not the way. What is the way? Paying teachers a good enough salary that attracts and keeps the well-educated. Our turnover rate of teachers, head custodians, principals, and superintendents is obscene. Treat teachers with the respect due to the professionals they are. If a teacher needs micromanagement, s/he ought not be given a tax-subsidized space and a captive audience to ply his/her verbal performance. S/he ought not be reprimanded at the first complaint by a community member. It’s hard enough without the interference of enthusiasts’ promoting the newest program. Wonder why we haven’t heard anything from that other drop-out factory? Might it be that Naples High faculty discovered that my senior class teaching assignment is being changed to freshmen? I’m not the problem. Force changing my teaching assignment from seniors to freshmen is not the solution. What is going to stop the production line of drop-out factories? Pay teachers good wages and let them practice their own magic methods of inspiring kids. Worry more about taxes spent on war than that spent on kids and their teachers.