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SeraficLeo
Guest
I’m 33. When I was a late teen I used to enjoy conversation with college/university graduates. Now you ask them a simple question and they react like wild dogs.
Is dumbing-down why graduation rates are up? In both high school and college?
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SeraficLeo
Guest
Every idiot is “prepared for the workforce.” You don’t need an education to be “prepared for the workforce.”
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DarkLight
Guest
Part of the concern with charter schools is that even when they’re successful, they’re not really improving outcomes overall. Rather they’re being selective enough to select out students who wouldn’t do well.
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Trader
Guest
I do not have direct experience with any charter schools, so I can’t disagree with you. I had 17 years of Catholic schools that were mostly very good. (All those years of repeating fifth grade add up after a while.) I do support the right of parents to choose how their children are taught. The catechism does say that parents are the primary educators of their children, and that one of the two primary purposes of marriage is the procreation and education of children. Is it any wonder that inner city schools with 70% single parent families score low?
School choice programs owe a lot of their success to the simple fact that they require parents to get involved, at least with choosing the school for their own children. In our city parents initially had a choice of public high schools with a 67% graduation rate or the two Catholic, or one Lutheran high schools with 99% graduation rates or one Baptist high schools with 95% graduation rate. Is it any wonder the public school teacher unions were scared?
School choice programs owe a lot of their success to the simple fact that they require parents to get involved, at least with choosing the school for their own children. In our city parents initially had a choice of public high schools with a 67% graduation rate or the two Catholic, or one Lutheran high schools with 99% graduation rates or one Baptist high schools with 95% graduation rate. Is it any wonder the public school teacher unions were scared?
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babochka
Guest
This is a common myth about charter schools and I keep hearing it perpetuated, particularly by teachers unions. I don’t know about every state, but in my state charter schools are required by law to accept all students, including special education students. They have more freedom with curriculum and teaching methods, which is a choice that our students, teachers and parents deserve.
What charter schools are not required to do is hire union members as teachers. Oddly enough, teachers unions are their most vocal critics.
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PetraG
Guest
The percentage of people 25 and over who have completed 4 years of high school has rose steadily from 1940 to 1990 (Fig 3, page 8) https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
Let’s be really blunt: high school is not that hard, even when it is “rigorous.” The main thing standing between a student and graduation is not usually ability. It is usually the extent to which the students show up for school and do even a reasonable amount of the work. Having said that, we know how hard high school was in the 1970s or 1980s. It wasn’t rocket science. If anything, there was a lot less science and technology for anybody to know. Let’s not pretend everyone was a great writer or an accomplished grammarian or that most people were in rigorous math or science programs.
We are a democracy in which every citizen has a right to vote that is theirs to lose. We NEED a literate population in possession of a reasonable amount of basic knowledge and capable of a reasonable amount of critical thinking. Therefore, I’d say that when any student does not graduate from high school or achieve the equivalent of a high school diploma by the time the student is 19 years old, there need to be serious questions. Was there an illness? Chaos at home? Failure to enforce regular attendance? An unidentified or untreated learning problem? If a school system sees serious problems in any of these areas, those ought to be addressed. This nation has no excuse for failing to achieve high graduation rates.
Let’s be really blunt: high school is not that hard, even when it is “rigorous.” The main thing standing between a student and graduation is not usually ability. It is usually the extent to which the students show up for school and do even a reasonable amount of the work. Having said that, we know how hard high school was in the 1970s or 1980s. It wasn’t rocket science. If anything, there was a lot less science and technology for anybody to know. Let’s not pretend everyone was a great writer or an accomplished grammarian or that most people were in rigorous math or science programs.
We are a democracy in which every citizen has a right to vote that is theirs to lose. We NEED a literate population in possession of a reasonable amount of basic knowledge and capable of a reasonable amount of critical thinking. Therefore, I’d say that when any student does not graduate from high school or achieve the equivalent of a high school diploma by the time the student is 19 years old, there need to be serious questions. Was there an illness? Chaos at home? Failure to enforce regular attendance? An unidentified or untreated learning problem? If a school system sees serious problems in any of these areas, those ought to be addressed. This nation has no excuse for failing to achieve high graduation rates.
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blackforest
Well-known member
I had my oldest child in public school during the height of the Common Core years. The academics were a mile wide (lots and lots of homework, busy work, and test questions that screwed with kids’ heads), but only an inch deep. Suffice to say, all of my children are homeschooled now.
To be fair, however, there’s no way to keep everyone happy. It’s either, “GASP! Not enough children are graduating and going on to college!” or “GASP! Too many are graduating with dumbed-down diplomas and going to college!”
I actually agree with the premise of the article. But if the emphasis is solely a frantic push to make the numbers look good, dumbing-down may unfortunately be an inevitable consequence.
But then, I have a highly unorthodox (and borderline offensive belief) that there should be a viable way to drop out of high school for those who so choose, e.g. greater availability of apprenticeships and other trade programs for these youth to make a viable living.
To be fair, however, there’s no way to keep everyone happy. It’s either, “GASP! Not enough children are graduating and going on to college!” or “GASP! Too many are graduating with dumbed-down diplomas and going to college!”
I actually agree with the premise of the article. But if the emphasis is solely a frantic push to make the numbers look good, dumbing-down may unfortunately be an inevitable consequence.
But then, I have a highly unorthodox (and borderline offensive belief) that there should be a viable way to drop out of high school for those who so choose, e.g. greater availability of apprenticeships and other trade programs for these youth to make a viable living.
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babochka
Guest
I have home-schooled my children since the beginning and it is my default position. I have one child in public (regular neighborhood) school for a year, hoping that they would be able to help more with her learning disabilities. It did not go well and she returned to homeschooling. A year later, we tried again with a charter school and it was an utter disaster, severely affecting her physical and mental health. My eldest son is a thriving senior in that same charter school. The other four are happily home-schooled. We really need to get away from the concept of one-size-fits-all education, for a start.
I think that if we, as a society, are going to mandate a high school education, then there has to be a way for everyone to succeed. We do a lousy job at that, sending kids mixed messages and wildly swinging with every new educational theory that comes our way.
I totally agree with you here!
Tis_Bearself
Patron
I totally agree with this also. It’s unfortunate that this society has made a college degree into the Holy Grail for success in life and has devalued apprenticeships and trade programs. I often wish I could have skipped college myself for various reasons, but I knew that if I didn’t just get it over with after high school I would be forced to crank through it at some later time in life, so I got it over with.
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Angel_Gabriel
Guest
Yes me too. I was a pretty smart kid through grade and high school but honestly I had NO business going to college right out of high school. Looking back, I was burned out with school and I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated. I kept bouncing around with what I wanted to major in. I finally settled on something but ultimately it didn’t work out. I lacked the passion for it and I knew NO ONE in the field to help me get started. ( It’s all about who you know unfortunately. ) Had I had an “in” I might have started to like it but I never got that chance and just didn’t care after a while. By then DH and I had started a family and well, I ended up alternating between the SAHM route and working various part time admin assistant positions.
I hope to be able to guide my kids better than how I was “guided” which came down to “get a degree, it doesn’t matter what, you’ll get a job!”…no mention or emphasis on doing something I liked and was good at and enjoyed. That’s SO important in preventing burnout and increasing quality of life.
I am also glad that my state has started implementing different pathways to ghigh school graduation and is really starting to push the tech/trade school route. The stigma of trade school has nearly gone away. It wasn’t like that when I graduated high school. I admit that I thought I was above trade school b/c well, it’s only a 2 year degree…what can you do with THAT?! HA…they showed me
…live and learn!
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Erikaspirit16
Guest
I favor the second reason given in the article: “Whenever high stakes get attached to any metric, finagling of that metric follows.”
This is common sense, but it’s constantly overlooked. Tie teacher’s salaries (or job!) to test results, and what’s going to happen? They’re going to cheat on the tests! (Some of them…)
There’s no question that you need some sort of quantitative measures to judge which teachers, schools, or school districts are doing a better job. But you also have to understand that more than 50% of any metric depends on the students, and you have to adjust for that. There was a recent article, something about was it better to be born smart or born lucky, and of course the answer was that it was much better to be born lucky. The “lucky” students who were born into families relatively high on the socio-economic ladder had something like a 70% chance of being successful, no matter what their ability. Meanwhile, those born into the lower rungs of the ladder had a 30% chance of being successful, even if they were excellent students in the early years of elementary school.
So if you take a teacher, school, or school district with “rich” students, they’re going to out perform the “unlucky” ones. It’s a well-known fact that “success” in school is tied most closely to family income. Should teachers’ pay depend on “success” they have little or no part it?
Also (I’m speaking as an ex-teacher–high school, university, adult ed) teaching is a highly cooperative business, whether it’s sharing lesson plans or dealing consistently with a problem student. To introduce high-stakes competition into that environment kills cooperation dead in an instant. No cooperation = worse teachers, it’s just that simple.
This is common sense, but it’s constantly overlooked. Tie teacher’s salaries (or job!) to test results, and what’s going to happen? They’re going to cheat on the tests! (Some of them…)
There’s no question that you need some sort of quantitative measures to judge which teachers, schools, or school districts are doing a better job. But you also have to understand that more than 50% of any metric depends on the students, and you have to adjust for that. There was a recent article, something about was it better to be born smart or born lucky, and of course the answer was that it was much better to be born lucky. The “lucky” students who were born into families relatively high on the socio-economic ladder had something like a 70% chance of being successful, no matter what their ability. Meanwhile, those born into the lower rungs of the ladder had a 30% chance of being successful, even if they were excellent students in the early years of elementary school.
So if you take a teacher, school, or school district with “rich” students, they’re going to out perform the “unlucky” ones. It’s a well-known fact that “success” in school is tied most closely to family income. Should teachers’ pay depend on “success” they have little or no part it?
Also (I’m speaking as an ex-teacher–high school, university, adult ed) teaching is a highly cooperative business, whether it’s sharing lesson plans or dealing consistently with a problem student. To introduce high-stakes competition into that environment kills cooperation dead in an instant. No cooperation = worse teachers, it’s just that simple.
blackforest
Well-known member
A friend of mine is currently blowing the whistle to teachers who were providing students the answers to high-stakes tests. All of the students received the same high score, so it’s easy to expose.
The highest performing public schools have become essentially their own form of private schools, with high property taxes becoming the “tuition.”
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Angel_Gabriel
Guest
Yep. Where I live the “best schools” are the ones outside of the actual city. All I hear is how good they are! Oh you need to move here b/c the schools are SOOOO good…never mind that property taxes are high and the only house we could afford would be 2/3 the size of the one we have. The stigma associated with going to the city school district is huge! you’re apparently either ghetto, white trash or an illegal immigrant if you go there
…give me a break! How will these schools ever get better if the “white flight” keep happening?
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DarkLight
Guest
I think this is a lot of where the real problem is. We realize that this is an issue. Something’s definitely not going right if we can predict success so reliably by the circumstances of a child’s birth. People want to fix this, and they see that things like high school and college graduation are associated with success.
So they put in measures to try to get more kids to finish high school, or to finish college. It’s a correlation versus causation error though, to oversimplify a bit. The kids who had the resources to get a degree when it was harder are the kids who always had a good chance to succeed at life.
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Trader
Guest
Thank you for showing common sense. Charter schools exist because not every school is best for every student, and parents are in the best position to know what is best for their children.
On Saturday I attended a graduation party for my niece, even though it involved eight hours of driving round trip for a four hour event. She and her sister have graduated from an independent Catholic school run by the Benedictines that is widely considered the best high school in Illinois. It is so good that even the Jesuits admit its excellence. It is college prep only and has to reject more than half of the kids who take the entrance exam. This niece was accepted into an honors program in engineering at a Catholic university. Her older sister is doing well after her freshman year at a Jesuit(almost Catholic) college.
I happily provided a lot of my own money so they could attend after their father lost a good job due to two bank mergers. It was the same school where I graduated 52 years ago. I remain the only alumnus to be an Illinois State Scholar, National Merit Scholar, with both the math and chemistry awards, and flunk my 8th semester of Latin. I hated Latin. Several different professionals tried to teach me Latin and they all failed. Why did I get the bad grade?
On Saturday I attended a graduation party for my niece, even though it involved eight hours of driving round trip for a four hour event. She and her sister have graduated from an independent Catholic school run by the Benedictines that is widely considered the best high school in Illinois. It is so good that even the Jesuits admit its excellence. It is college prep only and has to reject more than half of the kids who take the entrance exam. This niece was accepted into an honors program in engineering at a Catholic university. Her older sister is doing well after her freshman year at a Jesuit(almost Catholic) college.
I happily provided a lot of my own money so they could attend after their father lost a good job due to two bank mergers. It was the same school where I graduated 52 years ago. I remain the only alumnus to be an Illinois State Scholar, National Merit Scholar, with both the math and chemistry awards, and flunk my 8th semester of Latin. I hated Latin. Several different professionals tried to teach me Latin and they all failed. Why did I get the bad grade?
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PetraG
Guest
I think the question that needs to be answered for high school students is this:
“So WHAT if I don’t graduate from high school?!?”
It’s right up there with “Why do we have to go to Mass EVERY Sunday?” How are they supposed to appreciate an advantage they’re being given if they don’t understand what the effort is all about?
I see high school as the minimal educational attainment necessary to be a voter and a contributing member of society–able to read well enough to understand what the law demands, for instance–and not a pre-requisite for college. College preparatory programs are great, but they should not be what everyone gets. Our society has lots of places for people who have a lot of common sense and a good work ethic but not the kind of education that colleges ought to be providing.
For instance: I teach chemistry. General chemistry is very important for students who might be advancing into a science or health-care occupation. Having said that, it was frustrating to me that the curriculum didn’t give me the room to give all students basic knowledge about how to handle everyday materials: cleansers, fuels, fertilizers, paints and coatings, metals, plastics and so on. After all–everything is a chemical, whether it is a solid, a liquid or a gas! The concept of a mole is very important, yes, but being able to use the ideal gas law isn’t nearly as important as understanding why the weather report gives you not just tomorrow’s expected high temperature but also the dew point. Why shouldn’t you mix bleach and other bathroom cleaners? Why shouldn’t you leave greasy rags laying around? How do stain removers work?
I wish there had been more time in the high school curriculum dedicated to practical knowledge that everyone really needs, whether they’re going to college or not.
The other thing high school ought to teach people is how to teach themselves things or how to find training they want. If any of us here who are over 50 had known everything there was to know when we were 18 or even 22 or 24 but then were put into a time capsule and sprung out into 2019, we’d be grossly undereducated, right? If there was ever a time when citizens could have learned everything they would need to know for life by the time they were some set age, that time is long gone. We are in an age where part of a basic education has to be the skill to keep gaining skills and knowledge after leaving the formal education “system.”
“So WHAT if I don’t graduate from high school?!?”
It’s right up there with “Why do we have to go to Mass EVERY Sunday?” How are they supposed to appreciate an advantage they’re being given if they don’t understand what the effort is all about?
I see high school as the minimal educational attainment necessary to be a voter and a contributing member of society–able to read well enough to understand what the law demands, for instance–and not a pre-requisite for college. College preparatory programs are great, but they should not be what everyone gets. Our society has lots of places for people who have a lot of common sense and a good work ethic but not the kind of education that colleges ought to be providing.
For instance: I teach chemistry. General chemistry is very important for students who might be advancing into a science or health-care occupation. Having said that, it was frustrating to me that the curriculum didn’t give me the room to give all students basic knowledge about how to handle everyday materials: cleansers, fuels, fertilizers, paints and coatings, metals, plastics and so on. After all–everything is a chemical, whether it is a solid, a liquid or a gas! The concept of a mole is very important, yes, but being able to use the ideal gas law isn’t nearly as important as understanding why the weather report gives you not just tomorrow’s expected high temperature but also the dew point. Why shouldn’t you mix bleach and other bathroom cleaners? Why shouldn’t you leave greasy rags laying around? How do stain removers work?
I wish there had been more time in the high school curriculum dedicated to practical knowledge that everyone really needs, whether they’re going to college or not.
The other thing high school ought to teach people is how to teach themselves things or how to find training they want. If any of us here who are over 50 had known everything there was to know when we were 18 or even 22 or 24 but then were put into a time capsule and sprung out into 2019, we’d be grossly undereducated, right? If there was ever a time when citizens could have learned everything they would need to know for life by the time they were some set age, that time is long gone. We are in an age where part of a basic education has to be the skill to keep gaining skills and knowledge after leaving the formal education “system.”
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Sean
Guest
I found a textbook saying Salzburg was in Germany its in Austria what a silly mistake
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PetraG
Guest
Human beings make mistakes. Every student ought to be taught that textbooks can have mistakes in them and in fact that every textbook almost certainly has at least a few!!
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Erikaspirit16
Guest
Well, we finally found something we can agree on! Great!
I had one teaching job where on the first day we went into an auditorium to pick up our class “lists”–each student was represented by a piece of paper with their essential information. Each teacher had a small pile of pieces of paper with student names. When I came in the room, I saw all the experienced teachers busily sorting through their piles and every once in a while taking a piece of paper from their pile and exchanging it for another piece of paper in someone else’s (who wasn’t there) pile. I asked what was going on…they were busy getting the “bad” students out of their classes, and taking the “good” students from other people’s classes. All based on family name and if they had had the student before. Yet another way of gaming the system. Which teachers do you think had more “successful” students every year? (hint: the ones who cherry picked their students)
Also, at the end of the school year all the teachers of a certain grade met together in what was called a “promotion meeting.” If Billy failed your class and passed his other classes, it was up to you whether or not Billy was advanced to the next grade. Peer pressure? In some cases failing Billy meant Billy couldn’t be the star quarterback next year, etc. Of course you could decide whatever you wanted, but you would be the “bad guy” for the next year. Unless you were a masochist, you fell in line.
I could give a long list of things that don’t work, but I’m not sure what does work. Inspiring the students is the key, but that’s not exactly done by following a formula. I do know that the fact that 7 of the 8 winners (tied) in this year’s spelling bee were Indian is not an accident or a coincidence. Clearly, Indian students are inspired to be successful at this. And when you see them interviewed, it’s clear they are self-motivated, although I’m sure family and friends had a lot to do with it. But how do you bottle that and inspire every student? I don’t know.
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