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Comments from an AP history
and government teacher in Raleigh, NC.
e-mail betsynewmark AT gmail.com
Commissions earned from selling items through Amazon will go towards buying materials for my classes. Thank you.
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Sunday, July 05, 2009
Smart education move in Louisiana
Louisiana just passed a controversial education bill that shows a lot of common sense. The bill establishes a separate path to high school graduation for those who are not college bound.High-schoolers in Louisiana will soon be able to opt for a "career diploma" – taking some alternative courses instead of a full college-prep curriculum. The new path to graduation – expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) in the coming days – bucks a trend in which many states are cranking up academic requirements.I've long thought that we have made a mistake in trying to prepare every student for college. Many jobs don't need a college degree and some kids do so poorly at the college-track courses that they end up dropping out. They can't see a point in writing papers on poetry or doing geometry proofs and they get discouraged and end up leaving school early. It would be so much better to put them on what used to be called a vocational path to prepare them for those sorts of jobs.
The legislation puts the state in the center of a national debate about where to set the bar for high school graduation.
Advocates of the new diploma option say it will keep more struggling students in school and will prepare them for jobs, technical training, or community college. Critics doubt the curriculum will be strong enough to accomplish such goals and say it shortchanges students in the long run, given the projections that a large number of future jobs will require a college degree.
I've long remembered an 8th grade student I had my first year teaching when I was given a low-skills English class. She was a gregarious girl with very low writing skills and not very much academic ambition. But she did have a definite ambition to open her own hairdressing salon one day. She was very good at doing other girls' hair. But she was very depressed about how she was doing in school academically. At the time I thought that it was such a shame that she was going to go on to high school where North Carolina had just raised the math requirements for graduating. I feared that she was headed towards dropping out just as she said her mother had done. She would have benefited so much more from business and accounting classes rather than being forced to pass geometry and Algebra II. She would have understood the need to pass the former and have been able to succeed in classes that were relevant to her dream. I don't know what happened to her and I certainly hope she achieved her ambitions. But if she did, it would have been despite the North Carolina curriculum which tries to prepare every student to go off to college.
Critics of Louisiana's plan think that this is a move backward away from the ideal of college for everyone.With the new measure, Louisiana will join roughly half the states in offering less demanding pathways for a diploma, says Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a Washington-based education-reform coalition. "What Louisiana has done is take a step backwards," he says.I know that President Obama has spoken of every student going to college. Such an ambition is great for the bank accounts of colleges, but just serves to drive up college costs and funnel a lot of kids into four or five years of unnecessary classes that will not correspond to the actual training they need to do many jobs.
In recent years, more than 20 states have "identified a rigorous core [curriculum] intended for all or nearly all kids," Mr. Cohen says. Louisiana had been one leader in that trend.
A college degree has become more of a signaling device to employers that a student had decent enough test scores and grades to get in and the ability to study and pass tests to graduate. And that's great for many, if not most, young people. But there are still kids for whom college is not the answer. Rather than discouraging them and increasing the possibility that they will drop out, better this sort of career training that could get them started on a different sort of job path that doesn't require a college degree. So I applaud Louisiana's decision to allow those students a different choice.Labels: Education
9 comments
Louisiana just passed a controversial education bill that shows a lot of common sense. The bill establishes a separate path to high school graduation for those who are not college bound.
High-schoolers in Louisiana will soon be able to opt for a "career diploma" – taking some alternative courses instead of a full college-prep curriculum. The new path to graduation – expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) in the coming days – bucks a trend in which many states are cranking up academic requirements.I've long thought that we have made a mistake in trying to prepare every student for college. Many jobs don't need a college degree and some kids do so poorly at the college-track courses that they end up dropping out. They can't see a point in writing papers on poetry or doing geometry proofs and they get discouraged and end up leaving school early. It would be so much better to put them on what used to be called a vocational path to prepare them for those sorts of jobs.
The legislation puts the state in the center of a national debate about where to set the bar for high school graduation.
Advocates of the new diploma option say it will keep more struggling students in school and will prepare them for jobs, technical training, or community college. Critics doubt the curriculum will be strong enough to accomplish such goals and say it shortchanges students in the long run, given the projections that a large number of future jobs will require a college degree.
I've long remembered an 8th grade student I had my first year teaching when I was given a low-skills English class. She was a gregarious girl with very low writing skills and not very much academic ambition. But she did have a definite ambition to open her own hairdressing salon one day. She was very good at doing other girls' hair. But she was very depressed about how she was doing in school academically. At the time I thought that it was such a shame that she was going to go on to high school where North Carolina had just raised the math requirements for graduating. I feared that she was headed towards dropping out just as she said her mother had done. She would have benefited so much more from business and accounting classes rather than being forced to pass geometry and Algebra II. She would have understood the need to pass the former and have been able to succeed in classes that were relevant to her dream. I don't know what happened to her and I certainly hope she achieved her ambitions. But if she did, it would have been despite the North Carolina curriculum which tries to prepare every student to go off to college.
Critics of Louisiana's plan think that this is a move backward away from the ideal of college for everyone.
With the new measure, Louisiana will join roughly half the states in offering less demanding pathways for a diploma, says Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a Washington-based education-reform coalition. "What Louisiana has done is take a step backwards," he says.I know that President Obama has spoken of every student going to college. Such an ambition is great for the bank accounts of colleges, but just serves to drive up college costs and funnel a lot of kids into four or five years of unnecessary classes that will not correspond to the actual training they need to do many jobs.
In recent years, more than 20 states have "identified a rigorous core [curriculum] intended for all or nearly all kids," Mr. Cohen says. Louisiana had been one leader in that trend.
A college degree has become more of a signaling device to employers that a student had decent enough test scores and grades to get in and the ability to study and pass tests to graduate. And that's great for many, if not most, young people. But there are still kids for whom college is not the answer. Rather than discouraging them and increasing the possibility that they will drop out, better this sort of career training that could get them started on a different sort of job path that doesn't require a college degree. So I applaud Louisiana's decision to allow those students a different choice.
Labels: Education
What will happen to those millions of social science, sociology, woman studies, minority studies, ethnic studies ... Ph.D's who have sights on the professorships to teach their trades to incoming wide eyed college freshmen if those freshmen are not coming in any more?
Unfortunately they still run the schools and gettng new manual arts programs installed will have to be done without their help. Buried in the new defense budget is an actual increase in the money allocated to technical classes throughout the nation which adds to one more positive about this change.
As I pointed out on my website yesterday, some 80% of Texas diplomas do not require a college degree -- and 44% of those paying more than the average salary in the state do not require such a degree. Let's prep our students for some of those jobs, too, if that is their interest in life.
I've known so many high school graduates (college graduates too) who think that because there are checks in the in check book, there's money in the account.
Or those that were maxed out on their credit cards, but once they made a payment and were below their limit, they had that money again to spend...
Some have argued that many kids in high school are not yet mature enough to make this important decision--if given the choice they will always take the easy way out.
I also remember when Louisiana had the two track system and it seemed to work well at the time.Of course the public school system was still doing quite well and did not have all of the problems that it has now. The New Orleans public schools come to mind.
I do hope this works as intended and "politics as usual" within the school system does not get in the way of common sense..
School districts could also offer local diplomas, which, while adhering to some state minima, did not require passing the Regents exams. These were great for kids who were going into trades, etc.
This option has been all but eliminated - so those who could have earned a legitmate, trade-based diploma in earlier years are now most likely to simply drop out. I don't see this as progress.
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_12320910
