Smart education move in Louisiana
BETSY'S PAGE
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Betsy's Page (5 July 2009)
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