Is It Any Wonder Why There Are So Many Slackers In This Country?
Posted by Contrarian on December 18th, 2006
The push to reform the U.S. educational system, including the smart idea to push kids out after the tenth grade, is validated in part by quandaries like the one faced in Arizona regarding slacking seniors:
It’s senior year and the hardest work is over. For many high school students, that means it’s time to coast.
The usual way is to take four hours of class in the morning — including perhaps cooking, ceramics or as a teacher’s aide — then at 11:30 or so, head to a job or home to while away time on the computer.
But educators have a new message: The days when seniors can slide are coming to an end.
State and district officials are taking steps to ramp up the year’s value and intensity, including lengthening the school day.
Within a decade, the beloved half-day option will be extinct.
School officials are asking themselves why they allow so many students to ease off during their senior year when Arizona education is under fire and the global marketplace demands higher skills.
Students can expect to face more required internships and tougher courses just to graduate, such as the stepped-up math proposed by a governor’s panel last week. Schools also want to persuade students to stay on campus by offering a wider variety of college courses or online courses, such as Japanese.
. . .
Several districts are pushing beyond state requirements to get more seniors back into full school days.
- Mesa Unified is considering requiring students to complete two semesters of a subject to earn extra credit for accelerated courses. That would discourage them from shrugging off the second half of senior course work.
- Glendale Union plans to add internships and fieldwork that match a student’s career interests, such as learning in hospitals or at engineering firms.
- Peoria Unified is looking at more advanced online classes and additional courses that allow students to get both high school and college credits.
Many districts already require more than the state’s minimum 20 credits to graduate. Peoria requires 28, for example.
But rather than simply giving kids more work (and give teachers more jobs — win-win, that!), as it sounds like some of the proposals intend, why not push them out and encourage them to enroll in actual community college classes, participate in actual apprenticeships or take technicial classes in the private sector that surpass the typical auto-shop classes districts provide?
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Now Playing: Episode 361
The Presidential campaign gets nasty while the banking crisis goes international.
Links Mentioned: The coveted Buckley endorsement … and the Brooks non-endorsement … the European banking bailout vs. the U.S. bailout redux … Frank Rich … GM and Chrysler get cozy.
Part of the problem is the “fallacy of the liberal arts education.” (C.f., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has an education policy based on the idea that all high school students should be able to attend four-year college.)
Liberal arts education is clearly not for everyone. But the problem is that, generally speaking, to reach the upper echelons of American society you need to have some facsimile of a four year liberal arts education. So if you encourage some high school students to take vo-tech classes — while you may be doing them a favor in the short term — you’re essentially consigning them to a permanent “opt-out” of the theoretical best outcome.
I know and you know and most anyone who reads this blog knows that most kids who would even consider vo-tech probably aren’t much concerned with whether or not they’ll meet the right people to someday enable their run for the Presidency, but this does present certain problems for a theory of social justice based on “equality of opportunity.” Vo-tech simply doesn’t provide an equal opportunity for any given student when viewed from a certain point of view, although I agree that it’s probably a superior opportunity for many students from other points of view. It all depends on what the social goal is and what the tradeoffs are, just like any policy decision.
Except that opportunity is still equal if everyone graduates after the 10th grade — students can still decide whether to move on to community college classes then or take something different (I’m thinking DeVry instead of vo-tech).