1. True or False–More than 1/3 of Americans aged 25-29 have a bachelor’s degree.
2. What is the ratio of poor adults (from households making less than $35,000) that have a bachelor’s degree by age 24?
a) 1 in 5
b) 1 in 12
c) 1 in 17
d) 1 in 23
3. What is the ratio for those coming from the richest families ($85,000 a year)?
a) 1 in 2
b) 1 in 5
c) 1 in 8
d) 1 in 12
4. True or False–Nationally, high school graduation rates are increasing.
5. True or False–More than 40 percent of students graduating from America’s high schools are unprepared to deal with either college courses or anything but an entry-level job in the workplace according to a recent National Governor’s Association Report.
Oy. You can guess the answers, can’t you? False (29% do), c, a, False, True.
Two points. First, Ted Sizer from The Red Pencil:
“The best predictor of a child’s educational success always has been and still is the economic and social class of his family rather than the school that he or she happens to attend. The schools as they presently function appear, save at the well publicized margins, rarely to countervail the accidents of family, wealth and residence. “Success,” as conventionally defined, and ultimately graduation thus depend largely on the chance of birth and income, embarrassing a democracy that pretends to offer equal educational opportunities for all.”
Second, when are we going to look at these problems and admit that this model doesn’t work any longer, that it hasn’t for most Americans for the last 50 years, and that no amount of testing and forced regurgitation is going to fix them?
I know I tend to the dramatic at times…sorry. But there is so much change coming down the pipe right now, not just from technology, but from other countries and economies that seem to be figuring it out more quickly than we are. There is no innovation in testing. There is no creativity in standardizing curriculum to fit a model that is no longer relevant.
Double oy. Maybe I’m just grumpy today…
(Sources: NY Times, Detroit News.)
Question – what are the graduation rates for the middle class?
Pre-NCLB there wasn’t equal educational opportunity. If your child happened to attend a lousy school (for example, the D.C. public schools with the highest per-student spending in the country) and you couldn’t afford private school, that was just too bad. Under NCLB, parents at least have the right to transfer their students to better schools. Until someone comes up with a reliable, valid, and efficient means of evaluating portfolios (and perhaps blogs and wikis can wind up being a part of this?) then bubble-in tests are the best measuring tool we have.
Regarding Kellner’s article, I’m about 3/4 of the way through it, and a statement on p. 20 seems apropos:
So now, according to Kellner, it’s a privilege to attend an adequate school? At least the elite class is growing….
Except NCLB doesnt really guarantee anything. Yes, there’s a lot of great-sounding language but, consider the following:
1. In NYC, there are limited spaces for students in already vastly overcrowded schools. A good school, one that does well under NCLB, is usually “good” because of smaller class sizes, etc. So, what happens when a deluge of students hits? Perhaps not surprisingly, results start to fall.
2. The state, not the federal gov’t, determines what is considered Adequate Yearly Progress. AYP in New York is different from AYP in Arkansas. Students don’t have the opportunity to transfer from one state to the other in search of a better education, nor is there a standard out there (except the SAT) to tell anyone that their state has a lower/worse standard than another.
3. Even in NY, which is supposed to have some of the toughest criteria and testing for graduation (the Regents exams), students are slipping. Scores are going down, not up, under NCLB.
Hi,
Lots of wonderful, thought-provoking stuff here, Will, and great links. Coming late to the discussion, so this may have already been thrashed out here earlier, but clearly it seems that for more and more people, the issue of blogging in the classroom cannot be dealt with in depth without also looking at the whole issue of the purpose of education and schooling (viz. Will’s frequent references to Theodore Sizer, et al.) So here’s another one, John Taylor Gatto, who argues (convincingly in my opinion, and of course he’s not the first) that the purpose of modern education was never the “equality for all” humanitarian-sweetness-and-light pitch we’ve been sold. This is only a short step beyond John Holt’s conclusion that schools are not the best places for learning because what the children “learn” is the games of “pleasing the teacher”, “getting the right answers” and “obeying the rules”; their fear of failing at these games interferes with their real business of learning, Holt concluded, and so led him to the home-schooling idea. Any thoughts on Gatto? Or is that a distraction from the present discussion? Gatto’s Against School article in Harper’s, which I think summarizes his book “The Underground History of American Education.
Marco Polo
We have to do something.
The factors that affect those poor students’ education negatively can be found in almost every school. However, more impoverished areas are prone to have more of these negative factors because of the never ending cycle. More children have absentee parents, thus learning from their example (if they servive) that it is not necessary for them to be good parents. Although as teachers we are supposed to be able to teach any student despite of a lack of educational support for parents, I believe that it is close to impossible for a teacher to help a student learn everything from scratch without any parental help. We must educate the adults of tomorrow about the importance of family and encourage them to have and love their own, despite the country’s presently glum marriage trends.