Is dumbing-down why graduation rates are up? In both high school and college?

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They praise Nevada, for example, for effecting a “dramatic spike” in graduation rates by, in effect, making it much easier to graduate: For the two years of the state’s new end-of-course exams, kids only needed to take them, not to pass them, and even when they’re fully implemented, they’ll only count 20 percent toward the diploma. What’s more, those who previous failed the then-statewide proficiency exam—all the way back to 1980—will now get their diplomas retroactively!
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Ouch!

I’ve got my old copy of “Ray’s Primary Arithmetic”. (Pub. 1877, this is the 1903 edition.)

Lesson 1 is “One and Two.” A picture of a kid with one hand in the air. A picture with a kid with two arms in the air. “Hold up one hand. One finger. Point out one block. One pencil.”

Lesson 20. How many are 2 and 4? 2 and 4 are 6. How many are 3 and 5? 6 and 4? 2 and 9? 2 and 10?

Lesson 30. 6 from 6 leaves 0. 6 from 7 leaves 1. There are 8 quarts in a peck. When 6 quarts are taken from a peck, how many are left?

Lesson 40 is about writing numbers.

Lesson 50 is your 9 times table.

Lesson 60 is division. (5 in 5, 1 time. 5 in 10, 2 times.)

Lesson 70 is double-digit addition. Lesson 80 is word problems. Lesson 90 is miscellaneous tables-- 12 things = 1 dozen, 12 dozen = 1 gross, 20 things = 1 score.

They moved pretty fast back then! That covers about 4 years’ worth of math in 100 pages, and you’ll notice they didn’t even get to writing the stuff down until lesson 40… up until then, it was all mental math.
 
I’m pretty sure not every kid was racing through those math lessons. Many of them probably took a few years getting through the 60 lessons, or self-selected out by quitting school if they didn’t do well. Also, in an economy where people mostly survived by either agrarian pursuits or by running some small store, a person better know how to count, add, subtract, etc pretty quick or he wouldn’t be able to function as a farmer or merchant. Kids learn math really quick when it relates to money for them or in those days, to feed their family.
 
One of the television stations in our city just finished a series on school performance here–it was shocking.

Here are some excerpts from the online article. There is much more, and it’s so sad.

We asked if they thought students moving on to the next grade level when they’re not ready is a problem. Nearly 75% of them said it is.

One middle school teacher wrote, “Students come to me way below grade level and it is unrealistic to think that I can bring many of them up to grade level before they leave me.”

An elementary teacher wrote, “Most of the students that I wanted to retain could not write their name by the end of the year.”

And another teacher wrote, “Some students are so academically low sending them to the next grade unprepared feels wrong.”

Twenty-three percent of the teachers we surveyed said they have had more than 20 students they’ve wanted to retain, but those students moved on to the next grade anyway. But if teachers think a student should be retained, why are they getting promoted?

A majority of teachers told us retention is frowned upon and just not done. Several said it’s because the district pushes “social promotion”.

While some teachers say eventually struggling students drop out or end up in trouble with the law, others say the students still earn a diploma. For employers in the area, that’s become a major issue.

“I feel bad for the candidates frankly who feel they’ve completed school, feel they’ve prepared and in reality it’s been inadequate for them,” said _______.

“Students are just not graduating with the kind of preparedness they need for today’s marketplace,” she said.

“It gives us a higher rate of unemployment, it gives us a lower average family income,” she replied, “And it probably contributes to crime.”
 
And these students are going to be the teachers of the next generation.
 
The “social promotion” aspect is what school has become. If school was about serious learning, many students would be held back or even kicked out. Also, we would have a lot fewer colleges, the students who went to college would be expected to be academically prepared before entering and would be expected to work hard while there, and those who didn’t meet the requirements would be kicked out. This is how it used to be.

Nowadays most schools have become the equivalent of “everyone gets a trophy” which is why it’s become so important to many people to attend highly ranked colleges, as it shows that you actually accomplished something.

I’ve seen “college graduates” whose ability to write sentences and spell is at a primary grade level. It’s ridiculous.
 
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I work in a library that serves the students in the teacher education department. All I will say is if you can, homeschool now. Too many of the students I work with are, I will be kind, not very bright and they are going to be teachers.
 
KyPerson said:
I work in a library that serves the students in the teacher education department. All I will say is if you can, homeschool now. Too many of the students I work with are, I will be kind, not very bright and they are going to be teachers.
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I was an adjunct professor for one semester, and taught a graduate class in the Education Department. I found a lack of curiosity about the subject matter. The students, who were either hoping to get a job teaching or already employed teaching, demanded multiple choice exams, resented any kind of assessment where one had to think “outside the box”.

Everyone had an expectation of an A, and planned to file an appeal if they didn’t get it.
 
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KyPerson said:
Too many of the students I work with are, I will be kind, not very bright and they are going to be teachers.
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I am sad to say that many of the teachers I had in Catholic grade school were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. One of them could not spell, and also accused me on one occasion of “making up” a word she had not heard before. My mother wrote her a letter with the word and the dictionary definition. I was shocked 20 years later to see this woman had become principal of another Catholic elementary school.

This was not the only time a teacher accused me of making stuff up. Once we were naming animals for some grade school assignment and I said “Eland” because I’d either read about them in the encyclopedia or seen them on Wild Kingdom or similar TV show, and I got accused of making that up too. My mother wrote another letter on that occasion.

Things improved in high school, where most of my teachers were smart and the older ones who had been teaching a long time (and often were sisters or ex-sisters) were very good at their job.

I’m pretty sure my in-laws, who were both very smart teachers, retired as soon as possible due to the decline in teachers coming in as well as the decline in students caring about actually learning anything and an oversupply of administrative hassles.
 
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I suspect part of the reason is that not so many kids have to drop out before they are 18 in order to support their families. Or that we put a higher emphasis on have degrees than we used to.
 
sallybutler said:
Or that we put a higher emphasis on have degrees than we used to.
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I think it’s more this. There are plenty of kids who would happily drop out of school to make money if they could find someone willing to hire them. There are also kids who drop out of school to take illegal “jobs” because they can make good money doing that.

It used to be a few generations ago that a person who dropped out of high school could get a good hourly wage job at a factory or a steel mill. By the 90s that had changed to the point where one of my relatives actually had to have a college degree (liberal arts degree completely unrelated to the work he would be doing) to get a blue collar job at the steel mill.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
It used to be a few generations ago that a person who dropped out of high school could get a good hourly wage job at a factory or a steel mill. By the 90s that had changed to the point where one of my relatives actually had to have a college degree (liberal arts degree completely unrelated to the work he would be doing) to get a blue collar job at the steel mill.
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I suspect this is a lot of the issue. College is being used as a basic entry requirement for a living wage. That means as a society we have to either pass people through college, or deal with a bunch of people who aren’t considered qualified for anything better than fast food or retail. It’s easier to pass more people through than address why that is the case.
 
People at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum also put a huge value on graduating from college, even if they actually aren’t very smart when they get out, or the college was in the bottom tier and is a national joke. It’s kind of sad that colleges, including the for-profit ones that were basically a money grab, tap into these dreams people have.
 
Lots of people hear that a college degree is a ticket out of poverty. That used to be true when most people didn’t have one. Not so much now.

I’ve heard a lot of GI Bill folk get caught there too.
 
I used to have this argument with a workmate of mine who had grown up with a single mother in a housing project down South and had an older brother who had gone to the bad with crimes, prison time etc. My friend was the “good son” who had managed to get a bachelor’s degree and a white-collar job and is still working at the same large company he was first hired into (having bounced around a bit in jobs) three decades later and will probably stay there into retirement.

His position was that even if these kids go to a lousy college and don’t get a very good job or career out of it, it is still better for them to be staying in school and going to the lousy college, rather than dropping out and selling drugs on the street corner, ending up in prison etc.

I couldn’t really argue with him there.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
I am sad to say that many of the teachers I had in Catholic grade school were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. One of them could not spell, and also accused me on one occasion of “making up” a word she had not heard before. My mother wrote her a letter with the word and the dictionary definition. I was shocked 20 years later to see this woman had become principal of another Catholic elementary school.

This was not the only time a teacher accused me of making stuff up. Once we were naming animals for some grade school assignment and I said “Eland” because I’d either read about them in the encyclopedia or seen them on Wild Kingdom or similar TV show, and I got accused of making that up too. My mother wrote another letter on that occasion
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There was a lot of that in the Public schools too.

I remember my third grade teacher (public school) trying to tell me that I was wrong when I said Alaska, Greenland, & Central America were all part of the North American Continent.

She claimed it was only Canada, the 48 States of the US, and Mexico. Nothing else. :roll_eyes:
 
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Yes, all of this is true; yet there is still more. For one thing, you asked why teachers promote students who are not prepared? The answer is that teachers don’t make these decisions unilaterally; administrators make the decisions. And if it is a public school, the chain of command goes from the principal to the superintendent. The whole system is literally broken. Something I find even more frightening than all the quotations you compiled is that, in some ways, many of these students ARE prepared for the workforce since those supervisors today who are in charge are themselves ill-prepared in the basics of education, and the whole society, well beyond educational institutions, has been gradually dumbed-down for many years. One caveat: it is not all gloom and doom; there are also some success stories regarding academic institutions and individuals who have benefited from their education. However, too many have fallen by the wayside.
 
According to a friend who teaches in our state’s largest public school system, graduation rates were quickly improved by moving the goal posts. When they used to report the percentage of entering freshmen who graduated in four years, the rate was abysmal. No problem; now they report the percentage of seniors who graduate–and the superintendent got a nice raise for the improvement. She makes more than twice as much as our governor.

The problem is not just with regular public schools. Our local paper did a report on a charter school that closed for poor performance. Its leaders then started another charter school that also has failing grades, but the top two administrators got paid more than $250,000 each.

This kind of abuse endangers an otherwise very successful school choice (vouchers) program. Parishes in Indiana are starting new schools and expanding existing schools, while neighboring Illinois, my former home, is experiencing school closures even with a much larger population.
 
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I really don’t know the answer to any increase in graduation rates. However, I was in a position of management in which two individuals (husband and wife) were professors at a university back east (which out in Oregon means “the other side of the Rockies” 😁). One day the husband came in to chat, and somewhere the conversation got off on education. He was a professor in Biology.

It was like the dam broke, and I was facing a torrent. The 15 minute monologue could be reduced to “What in creation are they teaching high school students - anything? Why are they not teaching them to think? College has been reduced to a super high school. And the Masters programs are what should be college level material!”

It would be mild to say he was on fire about it. Granted, I spoke with (actually, listened to) one professor; but he was nearing retirement and seemed to have a great deal of perspective. Students could not even write complete sentences; their “research” meant trolling the internet for whatever popped up, and they appeared to be disconnected between one idea and another. Work ethic appeared to be missing from their dictionaries, and he felt like he was expected to babysit them. Except, the monologue went at least 15 minutes, if not more.

The answer(s)? I simply don’t know. My twin daughters went through the International Baccalaureate program in high school ( a bit to their dismay and consternation). However, several years into college, one of them thanked me for insisting they stay in the program, and proceeded to tell me how she and her sister were so far better prepared for college than almost all of their classmates, including (to her apparent surprise) those who had had AP classes. And they graduated from high school in 2000.
 
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