Think of this post as "outsourcing" viewed from the other end. Of course if you want to "dummy down" the electorate... I remember a guy my father knew. He was against good education. Said, "All you do is ruin a good bean picker".
Too Tough, or Not Tough Enough?
To judge from my e-mail, many parents and teachers are deeply worried about the thousands of students who are going to be denied high school diplomas this year because they can't pass new state graduation tests.
So I was more than a little surprised to read a report being released today by some of the nation's best-informed education analysts saying that those tests aren't hard enough. They also say we need to toughen the high school graduation requirements in the majority of states that still give you a diploma if you just pass required your courses.
And if that wasn't bad enough, a close reading of their well-documented report, available at www.achieve.org, leaves the strong impression that they think even the SAT and ACT college entrance tests -- hitherto considered the most stressful high school student exams in America -- are too easy and too thin.
The three Washington-based, non-profit perpetrators of this hard slap upside our heads are Achieve, Inc., which helps states improve and coordinate their testing efforts; The Education Trust, which works to increase achievement by low-income and minority children, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which supports higher achievement and more accountability in schools.
They have joined together to form what they call the American Diploma Project, and they are either far-sighted or insane, depending on your point of view.
If this is lunacy, it is at least the bipartisan kind. Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, and Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, are Democrats, with Cohen having served eight years as a top education adviser to President Clinton. Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Foundation, is a Republican, and a former top education official in the Reagan administration.
Why, I wanted to know, would these seemingly intelligent and responsible people try to launch this vessel against the rip tide of politicians and teacher organizations and ad hoc parent groups who say the state graduation exams and college entrance tests we already have are ruining the lives of our young people? In the Washington area, only Virginia students must pass state tests to graduate, but Maryland and D.C. officials say they will have similar requirements in a few years.
Haycock summed up the case for more academic rigor this way: "There is a huge number of American kids who are doing all the things they are supposed to in high school and don't come close to having the skills and knowledge they need to succeed."
Here are the main points in their argument:
• The new state high school graduation tests are often at only an eighth or ninth grade level, and they do little to change the fact that 28 percent of high school graduates going to college take remedial English or math courses when they start their freshman years.
• Even though more than 70 percent of our high school grads attend college, fewer than half of them get a four-year degree, and that record is even poorer for African Americans and Hispanics. We Americans used to say, "So what? We still lead the world in college-going." But the truth is several European countries have caught up with us by adopting our open university system.
• Most employers say the high school graduates they hire lack basic skills. That's old news. The American Diploma Project, directed by Sheila Byrd, has spent $2.4 million of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's money on two years of research that has produced this new and rather startling conclusion: high school graduates NOT going to college, in order to find jobs that will provide them a comfortable living, need just as many academic skills as their classmates enrolling at Old Ivy.
• Too few high school students take challenging courses, and the classes they are required to take for graduation -- usually no more than first year algebra and an assortment of limp English, science and social studies courses -- don't leave them with much preparation for what they face in the real world.
One of the problems, the report says, is that most states describe their high school graduation requirements in very vague terms, such as "three years of mathematics" or "four years of English." The course menus of many American high schools make it easy to meet these requirements with just a year of algebra, plus an assortment of cotton-candy offerings such as "Business Math" or "Statistical Concepts" or "Modern Media" or "Forensic Science."
The American Diploma Project says the states must get much more specific and require that all graduating seniors have passed first year algebra, geometry, second year algebra, data analysis and statistics and a regimen of English courses that build strong speaking and writing skills. Those abilities should be tested on a statewide level, they say, and high schools should not let anyone put on a cap and gown without having completed a major research project of the sort usually required only in private schools.
The report offers conclusions on what students are going to need to survive in the workplace or in college from more than 300 faculty members from two- and four-year institutions, front-line managers and high school educators. One surprising part of the report for a technologically ignorant poly sci major like me were the examples of workplace tasks a high school graduate confronts these days. Here is an assignment for a machine operator apprentice at the Eastman Chemical Company:
"Ask the apprentice to mix a solution (#1) of 5 g Peters fertilizer and 50 g distilled water. Determine the percent concentration-by-weight of this solution. The basic formula is weight of the solute divided by the combined weight of the solute and solvent equals percent concentration-by-weight. . . . Calculate the density of this solution (#1). [The basic formula is] divide the weight by the volume to determine the density in gm/ml. Ask the apprentice to make a solution (#2) using 10 g of Peters and 50 g of distilled water. Determine the percent concentration-by-weight. Ask the apprentice: Why is the concentration-by-weight of solution #2 not double the concentration-by-weight of solution #1 since the solute is doubled? Ask the apprentice to use this formula to explain: C = x/x + V and 2x/2x + V ≠ 2(x/x + V)"
A high school graduate who wants to be a shop clerk or a janitor or a delivery person -- choices just as honorable and non-professional as my choice of journalism, in which I have no formal training -- is not likely to be using much of what they learn in the upper reaches of the American Diploma Project-required curriculum. But it is going to be difficult, short of the social and economic revolution that very few people believe in anymore, for people in those occupations to earn enough to support a family comfortably, and the project leaders say it is every high school's obligation to make sure their graduates have the skills to choose higher paid employment, if that is what they want.
To my friends who, like me, produce words for a living and sometimes note that they don't need ANY algebra for what they do, let me suggest that they may not be thinking it through. They can argue that math in all its forms should be removed as a college entrance requirement for us humanities types, but we all know that (1) that is not going to happen, (2) there are some character benefits from being required to master a subject that is difficult for us, and (3) excusing the sons and daughters of lawyers and English professors from math means that the children of day laborers who might need it for a good job are not going to learn it either -- and they won't have parents who will let them live in the poolhouse until they figure out what to do.
The American Diploma Project has inspired heated opposition. "Chanting the mantra, 'raise the bar,' while pressing for ever-higher requirements for high school graduates is wrong-headed for at least three reasons," said Bob Schaeffer, public education director for the FairTest: the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. "First, it grossly exaggerates the skill level required for most future jobs, according to economists who study labor market trends. Second, it assumes there is a one-size-fits-all high school curriculum appropriate for all students, no matter what vocational, artistic or academic path they plan to pursue. Finally, it diverts energies from solving real educational problems by failing to focus resources on the schools and communities where low performance is a genuine issue."
Author and lecturer Alfie Kohn, whose new book "What Does It Mean to be Well Educated?" is due this spring, said, "We know from both research and real-world experience that all the get-tough talk about 'rigor' and 'raising the bar' invariably translates into policies that hurt the very students whom these people claim to be trying to help. To equate harder with better (for tests or courses or graduation requirements) is not only terribly simplistic -- it results in the denial of diplomas to the young adults who most need them."
"Sure," Kohn said, "our high schools are in desperate need of improvement -- they're too large and impersonal, too authoritarian, too competitive, too segregated, too driven by grades and tests, too focused on forgettable facts and isolated skills. So when the 'tougher standards' crowd announces that the only real problem is that high school is too 'easy', I'd be tempted to laugh, except that the impact of their misanalysis will be so devastating for so many real kids."
Will higher standards for high school graduation produce more dropouts? Many educators say yes. Haycock, however, cites data from the San Jose, Calif., schools showing no change in school leaving when graduation requirements were raised significantly. "It doesn't fix the drop-out problem, but it doesn't increase it," Haycock said.
Can such an ambitious program ever find the political and financial support it needs? The American Diploma Project people say it will take time, and require a cultural adjustment, but then again when I was born most American adults were not even high school graduates. "We are arguing for equity of expectations," said Matt Gandal, executive vice president of Achieve, Inc.
The report has some suggestions that will please educators who don't like the relentless emphasis these days on standardized testing. The American Diploma Project wants assessments of oral presentations and research projects that don't involve filling in bubbles on an answer sheet. It would like colleges to report how well graduates of each high school are doing in class, which testing opponents have long argued is a better measure of high school instruction than average SAT or ACT scores.
And the report authors want states to rate colleges on how well they do in helping their students learn and persist and get their degrees, rather than, as the report says, "allowing them to continue to place ill-prepared students in remedial, non-credit-bearing courses and then replace dropouts with new students the following year." Once states have high school graduation assessments that measure what students actually need to know and do, colleges should use those results, rather than the SAT and ACT scores, to determine who gets in, the report says.
This will be of little comfort to parents and students wrestling with the high school graduation and college admission procedures we have now. But there is something to be said for looking beyond our current disagreements to that goal we all have -- a future where high school courses make sense to everyone, including the young people taking them, and where devoting some time and energy to those courses will expand, rather than contract, the choices they have in life.
washingtonpost.com
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