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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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HIGH SCHOOL REPAIR EFFORT In the seventh grade I played trumpet in the school band. A tall ninth-grader named Soltis sat next to me. I didn’t know his first name, as our only connection was the band. One day, Soltis wasn’t there. “Hey, where’s Soltis?” I asked no one in particular. Someone answered: “His father died. He had to quit school and go to work to help his family.” I was so shocked by the answer that the memory of that moment was burned into my mind. I can remember exactly how I was holding my horn when I heard the news. Later, a classmate two years ahead of me in school, whom I knew from singing in the high school choir, quit school just three weeks before his graduation. In one of the dumbest explanations I have ever heard Ron said he was “just sick of school” and didn’t want to take his final exams. Besides, he had a “good job” as a curbside valet at the drive-in dry cleaners a few blocks from where I lived. (Such jobs – comparable to gas station attendants – actually existed in the 1950s.) At age 19 I had a summer job at the local dairy cooperative. One night a young guy worked with me in the refrigerator box where dairy products were stored and delivery truck orders were filled. We were on the 2-10 AM shift, when lulls in the work sometimes permitted conversation. He said he was 27, and had quit school when he was 14 to work at the dairy. Married, with a young family, he was proud of earning $125 a week stacking cases of milk. To him, the future looked bright. I never learned his name. Two of those three guys I never saw again, after the brief periods of our acquaintance. But I doubt if a year of my life has passed without my recalling them. I wondered how they got on with their lives without even the benefit of a high school education, as our society grew increasingly technical and skills-oriented. Over the ensuing years I occasionally saw Ron, the curbside valet. I would be home to see my parents – either on break from college or visiting after I had married and started my career. Gradually graying, Ron was still there at curbside in his uniform and cap. He would give a friendly wave of recognition as I drove in to drop off or pick up my mother’s dry cleaning. After the 1960s my parents moved away and we didn’t do business there any more. Much later – maybe in the 1980s – I passed that corner one last time. The curbside valets were gone. Those three dropouts from my past came to my mind again when I read a report, last week, about the first-ever National Education Summit, attended by forty-five governors and over 100 business and educational leaders determined to do something about the nation’s high schools. The conference heard Virginia Governor Mark Warner (a Democrat) describe America’s high schools as “a crisis”, and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (a Republican) say “the issue transcends all those typical things that cause people to split in different directions”. In the Summit’s keynote address, multibillionaire Bill Gates expressed his outrage at high schools that continue to steer minority and low-income students away from rigorous classes that would give them a future in college and financially rewarding careers. “Everyone who understands the importance of education, everyone who believes in equal opportunity, everyone who has been elected to uphold the obligations of public office should actually be ashamed that we are breaking our promise of a free education for millions of students,” said Mr. Gates to thunderous applause. He went on to say, “America’s high schools are obsolete. I mean that even when they’re working exactly as designed [they] cannot teach all our kids what they need to know today.” Mr. Gates noted that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given $2.3 billion toward educational reform projects, including more than $1 billion for newly designed high schools that will offer academically rigorous courses “relevant to students’ lives and goals”. At the conference, Achieve, Inc. – a non-profit, bipartisan foundation created by the nation’s governors to help the states raise academic standards – furnished data which indicated that:
Achieve further noted that of the twenty leading developed nations in the world, the USA ranks #16 in percentage of high school students graduated and #14 in percentage of college students graduated. Both China and India – which were not included in the rankings as “developed” nations – graduate more engineers than the United States. A 2002 report by Dr. Jay P. Greene, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is also an eye-opener. His paper, “High School Graduation Rates in the United States” (1) –commissioned by the Black Alliance for Educational Options – shows graduation rates across the nation, including scandalously low graduation rates for African-American and Latino students. He also reviews ways in which dropout rates are concealed from the public by school systems. For 1998, which he studied in detail, Dr. Greene reports that the national high school graduation rate was 71%. White students graduated at a rate of 78%; black students, 56%; and Latino students, 54%. In addition, he presents the following findings (among many others): By State :
By school district :
Dr. Greene also found that many school districts reported extremely low dropout rates – possibly because it was politically unpalatable for this number to be high. To illustrate, here is a passage from Dr. Greene’s report: “Using a method that involves trying to track individual students the Dallas Independent School District in Texas reports an annual dropout rate of 1.3%.This number is implausibly low. …[By] my calculations Dallas has a graduation rate of only 52%. Even if 1.3% [is] compounded over several years it does not come close to matching the picture drawn by my graduation rate. If only 1.3% of students drop out each year, how is it that Dallas had 9,914 students in 8th grade in 1993 but only 5,659 graduates in 1998, while the total student population in the district went up by 10.5%? “In Austin, TX, mis-reporting of dropout and other accountability statistics was so severe that the entire district was criminally indicted. [Under] an agreement to settle the case, the event dropout rate was recalculated and the district’s rate more than doubled. “The state of Texas reports a 1.6% annual dropout rate while I calculate a graduation rate for the state of 68%. If it is true that only 1.6% of students in Texas drop out of school each year, what explains the fact that there were 274,208 8th graders in Texas in 1993 and only 197,186 graduates in 1998, while the state’s student population increased by 5.9%? “The state of California reports an annual … dropout rate of 2.8%, while I calculate a graduation rate of 73%. If the 2.8% figure is correct, then how did California go from having 380,223 8th graders in 1993 to 282,897 graduates in 1998, while the state’s total student population increased by 2.1%?” The governors are right to be concerned about the low graduation rates and poor education being furnished by the nation’s high schools. Mr. Gates is right to be outraged about the opportunities denied to minorities. I agree entirely. On several occasions I have written along the same lines. I do not agree, however, that the problem can be solved by starting at the high school level. This is merely the point at which the problem can no longer be concealed by pushing unqualified students along to the next grade. High school is the end of the line – the place where students can finally say, ‘I’ve had enough of this #!&@$ and I’m getting the heck out.’ Dropout rates are an expression by many students that they know their education is a waste of time. Although the truth should be clear at that point, many high schools continue the charade by pushing students into college who should not be going there. In early years of the 20 th century, a high school education meant something, so most students were satisfied to obtain a diploma and move on with their lives. Only 10% of high school students typically earned a college degree. We have now listened to a half-century of politicians preaching that ‘every student who wants a college education should have one’. We have spent mountains of treasure in a massive effort to make that happen. And we have let public education ruin itself trying to bring all students to the same (mediocre) level. After all that, the fraction of students who actually complete a college education is still about what it always has been – i.e., about 12% (see data above). I respect what Bill Gates is trying to do. He is putting up a lot of his money to try to make something happen in high school education that is a national disgrace. But I would advise him to be cautious about “investing” on this scale. Commentators whose reputation exceeds mine have noted that putting more money into the current educational establishment only furnishes higher pay for the same gang who created the problems we have. One wag said it was – like marrying a second time – the triumph of hope over experience. Various analyses indicate that student achievement levels in public schools are good through grade 4, but deteriorate significantly by grade 8. Thus, the public school grades which must be corrected are 5-8. Until problems in these grades are seriously addressed, no amount of crisis-conferences, governors pounding the lectern and billionaires shoveling money will make a bit of difference. Public education has big problems. High schools are only the tip of the iceberg. ******* (1) http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm
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