Politico’s crack reporter Stephanie Simon discovered a growing backlash among states against the presumption in the Common Core that all students are college-bound.
She writes:
“Florida students no longer need chemistry, physics or Algebra II to graduate from high school. Texas just scrapped its Algebra II requirement. And Washington state has dropped its foreign language mandate.
“A standards rebellion — or in the eyes of the opponents, the dumbing down of America — is sweeping red states and blue, promoted by both Republicans and Democrats. President Barack Obama has called for a rigorous college-prep curriculum for all students. States, however, are responding with defiance: They’re letting teens study welding instead of Spanish, take greenhouse management in place of physics and learn car repair instead of muddling over imaginary numbers.
“The backlash stems, in part, from anger over the Common Core, a set of standards that Obama has promoted as a way to guide students through a demanding college-prep curriculum from kindergarten through high school. But it’s more than that. It’s pushback against the idea that all students must be ready for college — even if they have no interest in going.
“Manufacturing associations, trade groups and farm lobbies have fueled the resentment at universal college prep, arguing that it’s elitist, that it demeans blue-collar workers — and, not incidentally, that it’s cutting off their pipeline of new workers.
“We need pipefitters and welders just as much as we need folks who want to pursue a four-year degree,” said Rebecca Park, legislative counsel for the Michigan Farm Bureau, which wants more vocational classes to count as science and math.”
Many people–especially policymakers and financiers who went to Ivy League colleges–would like to believe that all students are college-bound. But their beliefs are contradicted by reality when it turns out that a substantial number of youngsters would rather work than go to college, and that there are many jobs that pay well, don’t require college, and can’t be outsourced. Ideally, people should be able to get as much higher education as they want and need, but the biggest obstacle is the cost. It is easier to raise the bar higher and higher than to do something significant about lowering the cost of college. How about free community colleges(again), where people can get higher education without assuming unreasonable debt?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Overall, I’m pleased to hear this, except for the elimination of the foreign language requirement. All students, college bound or not, should be exposed to a foreign language for at least a year if not two. Language is inextricably bound with culture. Exposing kids to different languages helps to counteract the provincialism and nationalism that Americans (perhaps all humans?) are naturally prone to. Fluency isn’t necessarily the goal (although a nice bonus for those who manage it), but for a lot of kids, foreign language may be the first (and possibly only) exposure they ever get to cultures different than their own. It’s also a great way to learn about (and appreciate) your native language. I had a whole new appreciate for English when I learned that all objects in German have gender that has to be memorized along with the word itself.
I totally agree with you Dienne.
I am also pleased with offering much needed vocational classes which are mostly hands on and teach the much needed skills to keep our country progressing.
I also think that Ed Deformers have demeaned the skill workers as worthless because they have no interest in the academia route.
There is a place for everyone in this country and the One Size does not Fit All unless some Physicist can figure out a way to create a rubber robo suit that can shrink or expand to fit us all in an instant.
I think it is arrogant of our country to drop the foreign languages. Every person needs to speak another language. It is a very valuable tool.
I took Latin and French…Latin was so helpful for my English
I wish I had taken a course in Spanish.
Using that Rosetta program to help me as I would like to learn to speak fluently in Spanish.
Save your money, unless by spending that money it motivates you to use the Rosetta program. You can find many on line programs that would do the same for free or a lot less.
Ultimately, though, one needs day to day, 24/7 contact to become truly fluent.
Exactly, Duane! I am so happy to hear you say that!!!
In order to learn a language as we are built to learn a language, we have to use the language in significant, meaningful context with fluent speakers. Until we figure that out and start creating regular immersion situations, most of our foreign language instruction in K-12 will be a waste of time, just a whole lot of sunk cost.
But how could we create immersion situations for K-12 language learners? How could THAT be possible?
Well, we’re all educators. We’re supposed to be bright. That’s the problem. So let’s figure out how to deal with the actual problem instead of continuing to think that we’re teaching foreign language by having the district Spanish teacher stop into third-grade classes once a week to sing Los colores.
The only way to get language immersion programs into K-12 is by having students choose a school. It will not be the case that every student in the catchment area will want a language immersion program, and certainly not all want the same language.
We have many dual immersion schools in Spanish, Korean, and Mandarin in Los Angeles and Los Angeles-area schools. It can be done, but it takes time, equivalent training, and the will to do it. Stephen Krashen would be an excellent crisis.
source, not crisis.
And there is a window of opportunity for the innate language acquisition device to work in those immersion situations. It starts breaking down at about the age of 14–that is, at about the age that we start teaching foreign language classes!!!!!
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. If the people in the education schools talked to the linguists and the linguists talked to the people in the education schools, we would have reversed that long, long ago.
“So let’s figure out how to deal with the actual problem instead of continuing to think that we’re teaching foreign language by having the district Spanish teacher stop into third-grade classes once a week to sing Los colores.”
I feel the same way about music. Children need to have music experiences more than once a week, especially in early childhood and elementary school. Researcher/music educator Edwin Gordon has evidence that a child’s music aptitude can increase up until the age of about nine.
Why are some districts using our elementary music periods with music specialists as a prep for the homeroom teachers, and why are some districts cutting the music program altogether to “save money” and increase “test prep time?”
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Okay now you’ve gone & done it. You’ve made me mad. Any clue how many years it took to get ‘singing Los Colores once a week’ in the door of a grade below 6th? Despite decades of research on what early exposure does for (a)authentic accent [&that’s learning that never fades](b)nearly-instant listening comprehension & rapid ability to answer phrases with phrases [research needed only to ‘prove’ what common-sense observers of 2-5y.o.’s know anyway]– yet it took running scared from globalism to get Americans to put lang-learning in primary– and that same insulated public cut it back to 6th or later the moment budgets became tight, despite the increasing daily presence of Spanish-speaking workers. Did you know that even a weekly smattering of any FL in primary jumps learners’ ability & interest ahead once they hit daily classes in 6th? That’s the road to graduating kids who have enough conversational ability to be plunked down among non-English-speakers via travel or work & get by, soon fluent.
And that’s just about conversational ability, a relative newcomer to American thought on the value of FL-learning– I won’t bother with age-old values given to enhancing grasp of grammatical construction, reading great literature or important tech writings in the original etc etc. And I’m not going to touch the wispy politically-correct notion of exposing kids to other cultures [debatably accomplished thro the study of lang].
Yet here we are ready to hrow it on the pyre, if you can’t become fluent like a native by 12th gr, throw it out. If fluency is one’s goal, regular FL in primary and secondary goes a long long way.
S&F: I am arguing for foreign language immersion from Day 1. So there would be plenty of time for singing that lovely song.
So, I am not arguing against exposure, S&F. You are absolutely right about that. I am arguing for early immersion. I want to go far beyond “exposure.”
S&F to Robert: OK you are forgiven ;). Just wanted to insert a strong huzzah for ANY world lang at early ages– even 20mins a wk goes a long way to promoting later (even after yrs-long gap) interest, accent, ability.
I attended a public school in P. G. county, MD in the late 60’s. We had French in grades 4,5, and 6. Students would benefit from foreign language offerings in the elementary curriculum. We admit that we are preparing students for a global society, yet many public schools have cut foreign language programs.
We do offer foreign language nation wide. It’s call Common Core ELA. And for the first time we have foreign math too.
This is the great problem with education.
Every engaged parent has a well founded belief about what should be taught. Poster Dienne thinks that every student should be exposed to another language for at least a year or two. That is certainly not required for high school graduation in my state and not an admission requirement for students at the university where I teach.
If the poster Dienne is able to persuade enough other citizens of her local district or state, it is possible that the poster will get his/her wish. If not, well there is always private school for the children of the relatively wealthy. If memory serves, that is what poster Dienne has chosen for his/her children.
Congratulations, your capacity for being obtuse never ceases to stun me. First, if you can’t tell which gender “Dienne” would most likely be, I hope you’ve never been in a position to name a child.
But second, and more to the point, the point is that districts are scrapping language requirements that they used to have, thereby dumbing down education, all as a reaction against Common Core and “college and career readiness”. Words like “nose”, “face” and “spite” come to mind.
Again it is interesting how diverse education is around the country, In my state there has never been any language graduation requirement to scrap. Nor is there a language requirement for admission to a state university. Nothing to do with the CCSS, it just reflects the views of the good citizens of my state.
My apologies for using gendered language. I don’t like making assumptions about which gender a poster identifies with.
TE, you perhaps wouldn’t brag if your state did not require math classes at any level, as the public accepts it as a basic of education. Foreign language does not sit that close to the heart of what we consider basic, but it sure should be in there with advanced math in today’s world. Here’s one example, & not a recent one. Tho we [justifiably] decry traditional American FL-teaching as starting too late to allow conversational proficiency, my boomer-gen engineer husband got enough out of 7th-12gr Spanish to dust it off before attending contract negotiations in Puerto Rico in the ’90’s– & perceive when the client was attempting to pull the wool over their eyes.
I am hardly bragging. Just pointing out that state standards are very different from each other, and in my state the criteria for high school graduation (and college admission) are pretty minimal.
Both my middle and youngest sons will have graduated from high school with four years of foriegn language study. My foster son was born abroad and English is a second language for him.
Follow Florida and Texas. 🙂
Washington..please think twice about that move.
This is such an important topic. I have some students that want to be doctors, lawyers and teachers, but there are just as many who dream of being chefs, dressing hair, or working in small family businesses — food trucks, landscaping, construction, ethnic food markets. One size fits all (college and career) actually shuts out other kinds of dreams.
Yes.
The only drawback to requiring foreign language is the classes then become more like culture classes instead of hard core language. But I agree they need to be there somehow.
Think of the inverse. If we all suddenly had to pass welding to graduate, a lot of us would not graduate.
I also think chemistry is something we all need, at some level. Even home economics used to have more chemistry than some folks get anymore. Some kind of applied chemistry perhaps.
You could weld if you were taught how.
There is absolutely no reason why one couldn’t create a class that teaches a lot of chemistry in conjunction with learning about materials and welding.
I bet that most people blogging here don’t know that there are HUNDREDS of varieties of welding for different materials. Why are there so many varieties? Because we have a need to fasten together varying materials of varying chemical composition.
“The only drawback to requiring foreign language is the classes then become more like culture classes instead of hard core language.” I don’t know why this should be so. Do you mean they would be ‘dumbed down’ so kids would pass more easily? I found the opposite in my local system. Since IEP keeps kids out of FL until 10th gr (to make room for resource rm), those kids get, e.g. SpI divided into 2 yrs & taught entirely via recent conversational methods. Mine graduated w/much better conversational skills than the usual FLI grad. ‘Cultural content’ (sarcasm – usually over-specified in unnecessary detail by nosy-body gov’t) can be inserted creatively in the target language
Reblogged this on McBlog.
Sólo los gringos pueden ser tan egoístas e ignorantes en pensar que es mejor no aprender otra lengua. ¡Ay díos mío!
In our state world language isn’t required to graduate from high school, but students need two years of the same language to be admitted to university. Our state university administers a proficiency test to incoming students and they must take non-credit language classes if they don’t pass. High school students not college bound can opt out of world language. We are concerned about the people who want to count computer programming as a world language. Crazy idea.
In my state, there is no foreign language requirement for admission to any state university.
Duane you would love my principal. She is from Puerto Rico. My school has a dual language immersion program and I love it! We are on our way to becoming a bi-lingual school. It’s wonderful.
También es muy práctico, entender lo que dicen los camareros de barro mientras preparando su comida, las niñeras entre ellas, los trabajadores en su casa que charlan sobre el precio que van a cargar, no? Es ridiculo que los americanos creen que no necesitan hablar español.
It is ridiculous, and becoming more so every day.
I look forward, Duane, to the day when we are truly a two-language country. I recently moved into a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, and I am relearning the Spanish I forgot many years ago. I can read what you just wrote, but I can’t even begin to write and speak the language myself. But I intend to learn. My lord, what a beautiful language!!! The language of Pablo Neruda.
“How about free community colleges(again), where people can get higher education without assuming unreasonable debt?”
My only issue with this proposal is that community colleges would be the only institutions that would offer free education to the masses. In many countries, higher education at all institutions is free to citizens. There are plenty of fields where a 4-year college degree is required in order to be employed, yet the pay does not justify the debt of getting said degree. With the exception of graduate level specialization, post-secondary education ought to be free for citizens. I’m sure the elitists will cry that this proposal would prevent colleges and universities from having competitive programs, but how does this work so well in other countries?
I’m a community college teacher. Please stop dumping all the problems onto community colleges. It isn’t “free.” The cost comes from my taxes and my low pay.
Instead, let’s stop defining “success” as “two (or at the most 3) years and you graduate or you’re a failure.” Make it possible for people to truly go part-time. How about substantial monetary rewards for part-time students who maintain a high average?
Students waste their education because it doesn’t cost them enough. I’m sick of babysitting for 18-year-olds who think they deserve a degree because they occasionally deign to show up..
How about real useful vocational programs with apprenticeships?
A traditional college education is probably suitable only for individuals with IQ’s over 110, about 25% of the US population and about 10% of the world population. Today about 15% of taxicab drivers in the US have a college degree. A few decades ago that number was less than one percent. Clearly we have far too many college graduates. In a few fields such as chemical or petroleun engineering a college degree is still worth a lot but in general the value of a college degree is not what it used to be.
What’s your IQ, Jim?
My experience is that a lot of cab drivers are well-educated immigrants trying to reach the American dream. They find it hard to enter the field they were educated for due to inadequate English fluency.
What is your fascination with IQ, Jim? And would you therefore administer an IQ test to everyone an determine what they could do because of it? Are you aware of the many limitations of IQ testing?
Jim, Richard Feynman’s IQ was 125, and he was clearly one of the smartest people who ever lived. Mine is 180. It would be ludicrous for me to think that I am much smarter than Richard Feynman was!!! These are very, very crude measures.
The job one has after college has nothing to do with IQ. But it does have a lot to do with choices made in college and job opportunities where the college graduate lives.
If a college student majors in a field with a high unemployment rate, then the odds of landing a job in that field are few.
If a job opens up outside of the graduate’s home town and they are offered that job but don’t want to move, then the choice is to keep driving a taxi.
For instance, a close friend of mine who was also a teacher has a son with a low IQ who graduated from college with a valuable degree and landed a high paying job right out of college and is doing fine.
What happens after college has nothing to do with IQ but more to do with lifestyle choices and the college major.
The daughter of a friend of my wife graduated from MIT with a degree in physics and was offered a six figure job with CHASE bank. She turned that job down to major in the history of French Literature. While at MIT (Oh, I forget, this young lady has a very high IQ) she fell in love with the history of French literature and decided she wanted to earn a masters in it and teach in that field.
How many jobs do you think there are for this major? She made a choice to give up a job that would have started at $150,000 to chase a frivolous dream with a high risk of failure.
If the President was politically smart, which at this point, I have observed little evidence of this, he should call up Arnie Duncan (or maybe at his morning basketball game) and tell him to give common core a rest. After the problematic roll out of Obamacare, he needs to take a government lite approach to other issues on the legislative table. Common core would be an excellent opportunity to say something like,” we set out some national standards, I will let the states determine what they want to do with them–no strings attached.” Immediately following these comments he could then ease back on testing mandates and make the case that I want students learning math not doing test prep worksheets–this would be a win-win. Most importantly, he removes his Secretary of Education from center stage where his limited knowledge base shows brightly.
The big money is behind CCCC, Alan. The oligarchs behind the deforms OWN this administration.
If you are in in the area (Wilmington NC) . . .
Please Join Us! Career and Technical Education Forum Feb. 27, 4 – 6 p.m.
A free public forum from the UNCW Dropout Prevention Coalition on career and technical education (CTE) will be held Feb. 27 at the Watson College. It will feature CTE programs in New Hanover, Brunswick, Pender, Onslow and other counties and a discussion on the future of CTE at high schools in the region. Click below to register online.
http://appserv01.uncw.edu/SelectSurveyNET//TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=l2319o2K
So in this case, we should assume that lobbying groups for big business care about what’s best for kids? I bet if you look at the list of industry lobbying groups that spoke out in favor of these challenges, you’d see a lot of ALEC members. Or is it more likely that these groups want to continue their guaranteed supply of cheap labor, and ensuring the future generation of workers is poorly educated makes it easier to do that?
If we want good vocational ed in rural areas, we should be supporting public community colleges. Everyone here uses them for trades training, my middle son is one of the people who has done so. Our community college serves 5 rural counties.
They don’t have to start new high schools. They have this great resource that already exists.
President Bush promised to support public community colleges and so did President Obama. Instead we got program after program to change our public high schools.
Why don’t they prioritize and do one or two things really well? Why do I want an underfunded community college that already offers vocational training and an underfunded high school that also now will offer vocational training?
They’re just making the community college programs weaker, and creating a new fragmented and weak program in the high school.
Also, I know organized labor is unfashionable these days among the DC set, Republicans and Democrats, but unions offer training programs for skilled trades, and they always have. Why not expand those? Why should these public-private partnerships be run exclusively by employers? In the few states that still have labor unions, I mean.
There are, I believe, EDUCATORS in all curricula. I find educated, intelligent, people oriented teachers in all curricula. There are poor teachers in all curricula. It is the teacher who EDUCATES. There are coaches, teachers in all subjects who make a real difference and prepare children for life experiences, who make life worthwhile and yes, even prepare them for “jobs”. I taught vocal and general music, low end of totem pole in the thinking of many people but felt that if I were not as important in the lives of my students, delete my subject – which is often done. I once had a student tell me that he did better in every class because of me, a NEVER to be forgotten moment.
Indeed, children should learn to read, calculate etc but they also need to learn to respect themselves and others, to reason, to love the world around them and yes develop their spirituality. By spirituality I do NOT mean it in the religious sense although deep spirituality is found in ALL religions but it is not just a religious connotation. We can learn to love our neighbors by studying the art, the cultures and I believe, immerse ourselves in the cultures of our neighbors which expands our own world view and what a different world we would live in if that became the norm instead of just preparing children to work for the corporate CEOs of the world.
“There are, I believe, EDUCATORS in all curricula. I find educated, intelligent, people oriented teachers in all curricula. There are poor teachers in all curricula. It is the teacher who EDUCATES.”
Amen.
I just had the pleasure of enjoying the last 2 days at the music teachers conference in my state where I had lunch with a pre-service teacher who thanked me for teaching him general and instrumental music…in 3rd, 4th, 5th and 8th grade. I’m so proud to have this young man as one of my colleagues now.
Assuming that 100% of students should go to college is just as ignorant as the 2014 NCLB 100% mandate. Of course, not all will nor should go to college. Other options are limited because of the devaluing of individuals who perform any job other than college-degree-required.
What concerns me is the often heartless, can’t walk in any other shoes – but mine, non empathetic, lack of caring, I know best arrogance of many stereotypic policy majors dominating every aspect of education. They are absolutely everywhere in Education. Take some time to research their credentials. Majority are BS in PoliSci or Public Policy degrees. That now makes them EXPERTS in Education. Scary!
Given all that, most of these Experts have attended college with family moneys or student loans. If I had to guess, few had to struggle and work odd-jobs to earn their way through college. When one has to work through college, one gets another real-life experience. You work next to typical American men and women. You learn of their values, struggles, concerns and goals. You learn of their ability to perform basic mundane jobs for years in order to help put their children through college, work two or three jobs to feed the family. You also learn of how proud and satisfied many workers are in non-college jobs. We as a nation have done a lousy job celebrating the average worker in this country. We have set up an environment where many apologize for not having college degrees, and that they many not be as smart. HOGWASH!
The BS Policy Posh Pushers running our education reform need to get off their ergonomic chairs and plush Audi’s and work third shift in a factory, serve hotel banquets, clean offices, be a tool & dye maker, or pick up city garbage.
Policy makers have little knowledge, arrogance galore and they have all the $$$ Gates can throw in their direction. How would they ever understand that there are students who would love to work in jobs not connected to offices, get dirty and raise good productive kids. We as a society have much to learn. Not anytime soon…..
Agree, Hurley.
From your mouth to deformers’ ears
I don’t understand why this has to be a battle. Within my immediate family we have people who went the college route and people who went the trades route.
We’ve always had both in this country. I don’t know why we’d have to demean one and elevate the other.
For a lot of these people and places it probably comes down to more or a rural and ubrna-suburban divide. There are more jobs for college graduates in urban and suburban areas than in rural areas. That’s just reality.
I don’t really get why everyone is taking offense. This is one of the few instances where you really can have both in a public high school. Plenty of public high schools have both right now, and have for my entire adult life.
Vocational programs were shut down and General Diplomas were done away with in many states. Push toward college. Kids could work on career ed tracks, but college prep or sped attendance diplomas were the options. Another stupid plan.
Now, some wise brainiacs are looking around and noticing, once we painted millions of kids into the corner, that not all can or want to go to college. Years of discarded kids later, here we are.
Bottom line, we have too many dumb-as-dirt legislators and undereducated rich kids power ramming education reforms. I would still like a requirement of these brilliant meddlers to take graduation tests/ EOCT and publicly publish their results…before they can vote or act on any educ related issues.
I’m blanking if I ever knew. What is EOCT? I do know I don’t want any of these guys to feel that all they have to do in order to direct education policy is pass some test! End of program tests are a minimum standard. The ability to lead and formulate policy in any area should come after years of work in the trenches. There is no such thing as the “best and the brightest” right out of any credentialing program. Being the “best and the brightest” in a chosen field takes years of work. All you are good at when you graduate is being a student of that particular program.
“years of discarded kids later”
You said a great deal in that phrase, H.A.!
Well, BOCES is hanging on by a thread in NYS; voc eqpt has been gone from reg public hs for 2 generations in NJ & even rural NYS & it’s not always easy to get a seat in or transp to a regional public hs-level vo-tech. If it’s true this was done to reflect the mix of college-ed/ hs grad jobs in suburbs, why are people who fix my house, for 20 yrs now, w/o exception either college grads who later acquired voc skills, or (majority) immigrants drawn by lack of voc-skilled natives?
We have completely gone crazy on this issue. I work with a lot of people who have dropped out of school in NC since they could not pass Algebra 1. We try to help them get the GED and go on to post-secondary training or jobs. I am now working with several students who are at-risk of dropping out right now. One high school student is a gifted electrician/contractor (during the summer) who just wants his HS diploma so he can get licensed and work. But he is having real trouble with the quadratic formula. I have had students who wanted to drive trucks, be hair stylists, plumbers and work in HVAC, All of those jobs potentially pay more than my academic job that required more schooling than sense. The ironic thing is I did learn the quadratic formula ( though never ever had to use it in my real life other than to help high school students).
All of the professions need math- but I do not see why all of Algebra 1 the way we teach it now is a required. I want my plumber and hair dresser and even HVAC person to understand volume and measurement, A truck driver has other types of math to learn involving distance, time and costs. All of these do involve algebra but not the one size fits all algebra we teach now.
The most gifted hair stylist or plumber may be prevented from ever pursuing their dream because of the quadratic formula. They need a high school diploma to get admitted to the training at community colleges. Luckily, the community colleges help out a lot with Adult high schools and GED training. But of course Pearson just bought out the GED, made is harder, longer and much more expensive.
My gifted electrician/contractor high school student may make it- we are giving him some help this semester in math. But his entire class has already failed it once- the odds are not in their favor . . .
Your post makes a great deal of sense to me just as a parental observer. My hi-IQ LD kid was finally allowed thro because he could practically teach a class in quad theory, just couldn’t actually do the step-by-step. & my other LD kid took so much remedial math in hs to get by this that there was no room for electives.
There was not a single quadratic equation in my late ’60’s college-track curriculum, & my ivy-league college did not require any math at all for a rom. lit/lang major. What the heck?
This is the one area where I have always felt President Obama was off base. Often in the African-American community a vocational education is considered “less than” largely because of the history where only wealthy blacks could afford college because financial aid was unequal and their schools were of lower quality before desegregation. It is time to recognize that a skilled tradesman is just as valuable as a college graduate, even more so after a disaster. Thousands of Mexicans came to help out after Katrina because America just could not get enough in the New Orleans area. Not all kids need to go to college, but no one should be forced to work for minimum wage if they finished school.
The president’s other problem, closely related was, of course, embracing Teach for America.
Thank you, Diane, for acknowledging the need for vocational education. Learning to do something well with your hands should be a gateway to learning, not a one-way door to job security.
Look at Joe Youcha’s Building to Teach (www.buildingtoteach.org) program. Elementary and middle school kids are building boats to learn math (and it’s CCSS aligned). They aren’t likely to make a living building boats, but they may learn some math…
yes yes yes
Again, this approach to education is only possible because students choose to go to this school instead of being assigned to it based on street address.
Building boats (and learning how to sailing them) is an excellent way to learn math (and physics). I can imagine a truly wonderful mathematics and general science curriculum embedded into such a program, and I can imagine kids actually caring about and remembering what they are learning as a result. It doesn’t much matter what kids are studying as long as a fire is being kindled in them.
Unfortunately, in a time when we could use really exciting, innovative, diverse curricula, the standards-and-testing movement is encouraging more regimentation. We need a lot more alternative programs within public school systems.
If the programs are alternative enough, how would you know that they are in the public school system? Is it simply that students are not required to pay to attend the school? Is it that the existing local authorities are given control?
It’s obvious that the so-called reform movement wants to remove any choices in college majors that do not feed directly into a corporate job. And if you don’t fit the corporate model and mind set, you will be considered a reject (a loser without value as a person) by the likes of Bush, Obama, Gates, the Koch brothers and the Walton family, etc.
What they want is an education assembly line they designed and they control to churn out a product for their lock-step corporate world. Defective products will be pulled and tossed in the recycle bend to be churned up and turned into a soda bottle.
Have you ever seen the film, Soylent Green?
Wow, this is good to hear. I’ve been saying this for decades. College prep is not for everyone. And for any kid who changes their mind later, all that’s really needed is a high level of literacy and a love of reading to avoid having to go back and take bone head English classes to catch up.
We have a political system where those who make policy have eyes that are closed and can’t see the forest for the trees. They can see the world only through their eyes and we know much of what is done is for “PAY-O-LA” in some form…the American politial system way.
Vocational education in areas where there’s actual job demand is certainly a good thing.
But some of the comments on this thread are really depressing. Everyone should be exposed to foreign languages and chemistry and physics on high school, even if they don’t enjoy it, even if it’s difficult for them, and even if they don’t go to college or use it on the job as an adult. These aren’t just college-prep subjects. These are the subjects that teach what the world is, how things came to be, how the universe works. All citizens should take these courses.
With wages going up in China, manufacturing jobs are returning to the US but there is a shortage of skilled people to work the machines. I read a piece that put the shortage at several hundred thousand job that pay well compared to Wal-Mart’s poverty wages. None of these jobs require a college degree.
My point is not that everyone should go to college. Especially considering the often immense costs of college. My point is that everyone should be exposed to languages, chemistry, and physics in high school. Including students who will go on to be welders, lathe operators, and cashiers.
Exposure to other areas is good but that doesn’t require immersion and proper college prep leads to immersion—or at least it did before this corporate/political obsession with testing.
The only conclusion is that the testing is really a Trojan Horse designed to destroy the public’s image of public education and bring down the US democracy.
“The only conclusion is that the testing is really a Trojan Horse designed to destroy the public’s image of public education and bring down the US democracy.”
The rich and politically powerful are still trying to prove the “conclusions” of A Nation at Risk all these decades later.
It’s called a reverse conclusion. The forces behind the movement wrote the conclusion decades ago and then years later paid someone to find or manufacturer evidence that proves they were right. The term for this is cherry picking.
But sometime there are no facts to cherry pick as a source of evidence to prove what they want proved. That’s why the Koch brothers, for instance, financed and launched a number of think tanks with great names:
ALEC
David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation
FreedomWorks
Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform
the Cato Institute
and The Heritage Foundation.
“A network of think tanks across the country is quietly pushing the agenda of right-wing groups with funding from Koch brothers-affiliated organizations, a new report alleges.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/koch-brothers-think-tank-report-99791.html#ixzz2u59qiOna
These think tanks are tasked with manufacturing studies and evidence to support whatever the Koch brother want to prove including denying that global warming is being caused by CO2 emissions. They are revising history before it happens.
Here’s more info on the Koch brothers duplicating a method that works well for them as the revise history while it is happening.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/01/31/12105/koch-brothers-pour-more-cash-think-tanks-alec
The unemployment and income data tell me there is not really a shortage of skilled people. If corporations really were in need, middle class wages would be on the rise and the corporations would be returning to the model of the past, when they hired people with basic skills and trained them to be skilled workers. Now, the responsibility for specific job training is left to the individual and to the public and the corporation uses the “lack of skilled workers” ruse to continue to keep unemployment high and, therefore, wages low.
It seems that you are viewing the entire labor market as a monopsony, which does not seem accurate to me. Even if all companies conspired to reduce employment in order to reduce wages, their greed would have them all cheating, as they would make higher profits by ignoring the agreement than abiding by it.
If firms are deliberately not hiring workers that they should hire, they are leaving profits on the table. Roughly speaking, firms will hire workers if they will generate more revenue than they cost. The difference is used to pay for the other inputs used and generate a return to the owner. If a firm decides not to hire this worker, the firm is leaving profits on the table. Your complaint is that the firm is not greedy enough.
Unemployment and income data isn’t enough the tell the whole story. Dig deeper and you will discover there is a shortage of skilled workers in the US and people who would be willing to go back to school and be trained for those jobs often don’t have the money to pay for the training that mostly exists in private sector education for adults.
Avoid Fox news for information—too much bias there. Look to outside news sources who probably do a better job of investigative journalism without the bias from a news network that’s known for its conservative tilt due to a CEO who is a hard core neo-conservative.
Instead, I suggest this piece from Reuters, a European news agency like
Reuters reports: “American colleges are producing fewer math and science graduates as students favor social sciences, whose workload is perceived to be manageable, leading to a skills mismatch.”
“Technology giant Siemens Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany’s Siemens AG (SI.N), has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/12/us-usa-economy-jobs-feature-idUSTRE79B77U20111012
If you turn to Fox and/or other conservative media, they often spin news like this so this makes it look like public education failed but that’s not even close to the truth.
Individual choice is the culprit. After all, we do live in a free country where we make our own decisions for the future.
Educational choices kids make as they go through the Ed system is what leads to this problem.
For instance, a kid who believes they are going to be a famous actress, super model, baseball player, singer, etc. who tells their teachers that it’s a waste of time to do all this homework and to study because they are going to be famous and rich one day and they don’t need to learn this junk.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard a kid (age 14 or 5) tell me this in my classroom when I was teaching, I could pay for a week long cruise.
If you want to find out who these kids are, you need only go see how long the line is outside of American Idol tryouts in the cities they visit each year before the latest season kicks off on TV. It’s estimated that an average of 60,000 show up to try out for the one chance to win. And this is only one example of a country where too many parents and the media keep feeding kids the message to follow their dreams and those dreams will come true.
Another example: Tens of thousands of young adolescents fresh out of high school (or drop outs) flood Hollywood annually and have been for decades. They come from all over America chasing their dram of fame and fortune.
A perfect example of this inflated false-sense of reality may be seen Steinbec’s “Of Mice and Men” (a book published in 1937)when Curley’s wife tells Lennie and Crooks how she’s going to be in the pictures and be famous.
“If firms are deliberately not hiring workers that they should hire, they are leaving profits on the table.”
Firms would never leave profits on the table. They would just outsource the employment to cheaper labor markets (claiming a shortage of skilled American employees) to keep the company going and then claim there are no positions available. These firms talk out if both sides of their mouths.
If firms never leave profits on the table, they are not leaving employable workers on the sidelines.
Generally speaking, it is not the high skilled jobs that are sent to countries with high poverty rates, it is the low skilled ones. It is the low skilled workers in impoverished countries that are the people most in need of employment to feed their families.
I know you will have an irrelevant comeback, but we do have plenty of people who are living on the edge here. Companies are not going to third world countries out of the goodness of their hearts. People right here in the good ole USA are struggling to provide basic needs on our oh so generous minimum wage. Did you hear that even that bastion of “let them eat cake” philosophy, Walmart, is considering a raise in the minimum wage because their workers (and others subsisting on minimum wage) can no longer afford to shop there and are turning to dollar stores? Don’t dare paint outsourcing jobs as a form of corporate welfare.
Companies are definitely not going to low wage countries out of the goodness of their hearts. They are going there because the crushing poverty of those countries means that the people there are willing to work for very low wages in order to feed their families.
At some point, talking about degrees of poverty becomes ludicrous. At least we agree that there is nothing altruistic in corporate America shipping low wage jobs overseas.
It’s more complicated than that. In the 1990s, the district where I taught paid for a substitute and allowed me to attend an all day workshop that focused on getting kids to realistically look toward the future. It isn’t as if the public schools didn’t know what industry wanted and needed. We were partnering with industry decades ago but the kids weren’t on the same page as you will discover. After all, no matter how much advice a counselor or teacher gives a kid, that kid’s still going to do what they want. After all, we are a country that prides itself in the freedom of choice.
It was an informative workshop and there’s one example that I haven’t forgotten because it was so dramatic.
We were told about a Detroit GM bumper factory that employed 500 workers in the 1950s but by the 1980s only employed two who were highly skilled to keep the robots working efficiently to produce the same number of bumpers that 500 workers made decades earlier.
Both of these men who were being paid almost $100,000 a year with benefits were reaching retirement age and GM had to find replacements.
But US law required GM to find qualified applicants in the US first. GM spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising the position and interviewing thousands of applicants only to discover none were qualified because none had taken the classes that would give them the necessary skills needed for the job.
All that was required was a high school degree and a certain set of skills that most US high schools didn’t teach anymore, because the government had stopped funding vocational classes years earlier in its “Race to the Top” so every child would be college ready.
Once GM met its legal obligations, they advertised in Europe and Asia and finally found an eligible applicant in Germany who graduated from high school and with GM’s help migrated to the US with a green card to work in a job that started at $90,000 annually with benefits.
Do you consider “tech support” a low skilled position?
Again, I said generally speaking. But tech support can be a lowed skill position, or at least at times it seems to me that it is treated like that.
Another reason tech support is spread across the world is to take advantage of time differences. If you want support at 11 p.m. mountain time, it might be better to talk to someone who is wide awake because it is noon where they are.
I have no knowledge of what “tech support” requires. Can’t answer that question.
teachingeconomist, I am not going to debate you on the merits of my argument from a technical economics standpoint.
I am not trying to insinuate that there is a conspiracy. I am saying that there is a general loss of responsibility to anyone but shareholders that has occurred since the 1970s, and has reached its ultimate conclusion now. US workers who once were trained on the job are now expected to come to work already having the requisite skills. Since unemployment is so high, workers have no choice but to seek and pay for training themselves (which they can’t afford, because they’re unemployed) so they remain both untrained and unemployed. So there’s a “skills shortage”. Except the shortage only exists because corporate profits can’t climb ever higher if the corporation has to invest in its workers.
Furthermore, even workers who come to the job market fully qualified are often underpaid or even unpaid. We call these “internships” and they are the way a remarkable amount of skilled labor gets done in US corporations today.
I said about the same thing in another comment in one of today’s threads on this site.
Consider that with computers, the skill set needed for technical jobs was ratcheted up a few notches and this means higher levels of literacy and life-long learning skills are more important than ever.
So what do we do with children who grow up in poverty and/or in homes with no books, no magazines, no newspapers to read and parents who may be illiterate or who don’t even speak English?
Some answers to that question may be found in “Reign of Error” by Diane Ravitch. Her suggested solutions start with chapter 21, page 224 in the hardcover.
If you are reading an e-book version, search for “Solutions: Start Here”
It is hard to talk about employment and unemployment without talking about economics.
The idea that firms reduce hiring in order to lower wages must involve a conspiracy of employers. A single company hiring more workers has a much smaller impact on local wages than all the companies hiring more workers, so individual firms will hire more employees than is profit maximizing for the group (more technically, the labor supply curve for any individual firm is more elastic than the overall labor supply curve).
Again, I’m not going to argue technical economics with you. You are an expert in using those theoretical models for human behavior and I am not.
And, again, I’m not saying there is a conspiracy among employers. I am insinuating that when employers (who are typically wealthy) can buy legislative influence at a higher rate than employees, the laws that modify the pure market models will be skewed in favor of the employers. It’s not a secret, dark conspiracy against employees, it’s a quite open political process in favor of shareholders.
Lloyd Lofthouse:
I don’t know what gives you the idea that I have turned to Fox News for my information source. I don’t even own a television, and if I did, it would only be tuned to Fox News when I needed a hearty laugh.
I’m a strong supporter of programs that provide training for workers to do skilled jobs that are needed by corporations. I don’t think our unemployed workers can afford this training, however. So our options appear to be (1) tolerate a shrinking middle class and increasingly depressed wages for everyone except the financial managers at the top, or (2) tax corporations at rates high enough to provide publicly and freely the training they once provided internally.
Flexibility in business management is expensive, because businesses will have to constantly re-train workers as their priorities shift. Someone has to pay for that, and right now it’s the workers. Is that right? That’s a fundamental question.
Did I suggest that you might be watching Fox News?
I don’t think so.
My intent was to point out for anyone reading my comment that we must be careful who we listen to and believe in the media. I have no idea what anyone watches on TV or listens to from the radio until they tell me.
When writing a reply to someone else, I’m always aware that there may be others reading my comment too and sometimes I want to make a point that someone else might read.
After all, this is a public forum and I earned a BA in journalism so I’m always thinking of the wider audience when I write anything.
Please don’t take what I write personally.
L L: My apologies. I thought the reply to my comment was directed, more or less, to me.
This is what I should have said: Is the position I’ve taken one that is espoused by Fox News?
I don’t watch Fox news, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN or even PBS enough to know. I used to actually be a fan of conservative talk radio years ago and Rush Limbaugh called us his ditto heads and challenged us to check out everything he told us was true.
Then one day I did—several times—-and found out how much he was misleading his followers by cherry picking the facts.
Then I switched to another conservative talk show host, Dennis Prager, who was much softer and friendlier in his approach but the final message was just as false. Prager made you feel like he was the father you wished you always had.
Eventually, I decided to follow the evidence trail behind his claims and found that he was also cherry picking and leaving out important facts that would develop a complete picture. He was misleading his audience too.
Then for awhile, I was listening to all kinds of talk show hosts and spending ours fact checking their opinionated and often biased claims. Every one listened to failed that fact checking test.
I stopped listening to all of them and then researched bias in the media to discover that it exists everywhere to one degree or another and most of the editorials and opinions in the media are not interested in the truth at all.
Lloyd, RE: your 11:36am post — You had me until the Reuters article. It’s bare bones, & as you say, Fox can easily put a spin on it, but so can you. The article, & your concluding paras raise more Q’s than they answer.
(1) Reuters’ students choosing the easier-workload social sciences may be kids who would not have chosen college 30 yrs ago, or would have worked a few yrs first [in the ’70’s] until they had direction, motivation, & ability to work hard. The gov call of ‘college for all’ & difficulties of getting loans/grants later on have something to do with that. (
2)Many grads over the decades have tried to aim for the big-salary [most-needed] fields in choosing a career, only to be thwarted by the typical scarcity-glut cycles every specialty experiences. The advance of technology has caused the cycle to spin faster & faster, it’s like shooting at a moving target today. (
3)There have ever been poor, working-class, & lower-middles trying to get out of their socio-economic traps by shooting for celebrity to no avail. The difference today is that the proportion of poor/lo/middle-rich is far higher, yes you see them everywhere, just like the plague of casinos & lotto; the media panders to the consumer. I like to think of it as the tabloid version of the ‘American dream’. It’s not much different from low-income red-staters fighting for the right of big corps to screw them– don’t take away his perks, that CEO could be me!
The Lotto is the perfect analogy. Spending a few dollars each week on Lotto tickets are the easy way out.
But setting step by step goals and then starting out on the long journey toward the destination of those goals means most dreams are not easy to achieve.
For instance, losing weight. The reason most Americans are unwilling to do what it takes to lose weight and live a healthier lifestyle is because it takes sacrifice and discipline and eating fast food is more fun for the taste buds. 70% of Americans are considered fat and more than 30% obese.
Those numbers by themselves give us an idea of how many people probably don’t set goals and find the weekly Lotto dream easier to chase. Doesn’t take much effort to drop by a convenience store and buy a Lotto ticket and a litter of Pepsi or Coke to chug on the way home.
Let me clarify, I would love all children exposed and taught foreign languages several sciences (chemistry, physics, biology), social studies including economics, anthropology, psychology and sociology ( not just history and geography). I also am a big proponent of the arts. My issue is not with the subjects but the high stakes testing that prevents graduation. In NC if cannot pass Algebra 1, English 2 and Biology 1 you are a dropout.
Point taken. I may be misconstruing what some people are saying.
This is long overdue!
Here, an update of the Rheformish Lexicon:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/from-the-reformish-lexicon/
Yipee! I have been waiting for this. Thanks Robert.
Thanks, Janna!
Thanks Robert. Didn’t you write some parody piece on business euphemisms in education? Where is that, it was great.
Thanks, TC. I did. I will get around to posting it soon.
2old2teach ~ sorry!
I should have defined EOCT. In GA high school students have to pass End Of Course Tests for all/most academic courses. Passing scores impact final grades and credit toward that specific course. GA used to have mandatory Graduation Tests where students had to pass all 5 academic test. Fail one & you’re done. Kids could retake portions, but many students did not earn a diploma.
Another painting-kids-in-corners moments. GA has low HS graduation rates.
If Georgia had a higher high school graduation rate, would that mean that students had become more able?
Any school could give students a high school diploma at birth, but if they did it would become meaningless.
We do ourselves such disservice when we cut programs. Wonder what the reasoning behind was to cut foreign language, especially at a time when the majority (white) is becoming a minority. I remember a teacher several years ago in a discussion about immigration who said people who come to this country should learn to speak English period. I felt a chill up my spine. I turned to her and said, “Don’t you mean Native American!” This took place in an upper middle class school–no surprise. Some people just don’t change with the times.
A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs schools that identify the diverse potentials in kids who, after all, differ, and that nurture these.
Standards are for specifications for the threads of screws and nuts and bolts. See, for example, the United Thread Standards.
And even those recognize different kinds!!!
Kids are not screws, but they are being screwed. Millions are going to be told, “Sorry. You were not what we were looking for, not what we were looking for at all.”
And their genius will not be recognized, built upon, nurtured, grown.
That’s evil and stupid and abusive. It’s as evil, as stupid, as abusive as we Homo ignorans can get.
Stop the abuse. Do not miss an opportunity to tell people that schools should be about identifying unique potential and growing that. Do not miss an opportunity to tell them that schools should be about nurturing intrinsic motivation and autonomy. Do not miss an opportunity to call this abuse abuse.
For far too long we’ve said, in this country, that we respect labor–working people. But we act, in planning schooling, as though labor were shameful, as though it were what one does if one is a failure. Nonsense. Utter, evil, contemptible nonsense. We have developed a system that teaches most kids, mostly, that they are FAILURES because they don’t happen to be the proper sort of raw material for our particular production line.
Enough with the nineteenth-century factory model of schooling!!! The last thing we need is MORE standardization, more automation of a punishment and reward system for milling children identically. That’s idiotic. And it’s now national policy–policy made by a few plutocrats and their hirelings and toadies in a handful of think tanks, in government, and even in the teachers’ unions.
It’s time for people to get mad about this. Children are being abused. Their potential is being wasted. They are being crushed under the standards-and-testing juggernaut, and this has to stop.
How many children have to be absolutely broken on the standards-and-testing wheel before people say enough? How many young hearts, souls, dreams crushed? These are our children. It is our DUTY to protect them from madmen.
Does no one understand the opportunity cost of giving kids a one-size-fits-all K-12 education, how DAMAGING this is to half the kids or more? All I can say is, WAKE THE ___ UP!
I could design a course of instruction for high-school students that teaches mathematics and physics VIA wordworking and metalworking. Or mathematics via graphic design. Or mathematics and physics via computer science.
Or, we could continue doing what we’re doing–following a nineteenth-century assembly line model for identical milling of student products, with exactly the outcomes we’re getting. What percentage of our graduates are self-motivated, independent, autonomous, life-long learners. What percentage of those kids who took Algebra I and Algebra II will remember ANY OF IT eight years on? Ask around among the adults you know, all of whom did. Half of them will be almost completely innumerate. But they will have learned a deep fear of and hatred for mathematics. So, how’s that working out for us, huh? Gee, maybe we need to INTENSIFY the standardization.
My god. Such utter idiocy!!!
“What percentage of those kids who took Algebra I and Algebra II will remember ANY OF IT eight years on?”
I don’t know, Robert. I’m not in a math or science field, but I’ve found it useful to solve for “x” on many occasions in real life. Every person can benefit by using algebra to an extent–at least the big ideas. In this argument, I think we need to be very careful to not make generalizations about what is useful and what is not.
Robert: “What percentage of our graduates are self-motivated, independent, autonomous, life-long learners.”
Instead of debating what content courses should be taught, we should be figuring out how to create self-motivated, independent, autonomous, life-long learners which isn’t going to happen just by learning content alone.
From pre-school on up, many students in low SES schools come to school unprepared to learn. We have violence and drugs in elementary schools, in case anyone’s interested. They don’t give a “fudge” about content areas–let alone basics.
I have 6th graders who don’t know their basic facts and how to solve using the four basic operations. Some have mild to severe reading problems, but no one at homes reads to them.
Then we have those in special ed. who aren’t receiving FAPE (free and appropriate education) where instead CCSS & high stakes testing are required to set them up for failure.
Last but not least, ELL aren’t receiving services that would help them acquire English in the said amount of time.
My prediction is that CCSS will increase the population of students at risk.
Seriously, content areas are only a small part of the issue of serving kids to prepare them for their future.
We also need not only students to be self-motivated, independent, autonomous, life-long learners, but teachers as well. Teachers are losing the art of being a learner themselves, because CCSS and high stakes testing are enabling them to obey the standards or punishment will occur. We are focused so much on content and scores with CCSS that the emotional side of learning has been denied.
well said, Jon
I don’t think you & Robert are on different pages, not really. Robert’s point speaks loudest to me in terms of the creative teacher’s ability to design curriculum so as to engage his specific students– tweaking shop curriculum to focus on math basics for example.
For an opposite example, my eldest’s combination of high computer & art ability should have made him a natural for graphic arts. But that vo-tech instructor’s curriculum was actually focused on pedestrian marketing projects dummied up with low-level computer skills (why not let a 15y.o. go the distance w/computer programs, motivated by graphic novels or whatever else turns him on? he can apply it later to anything at all to make a buck).
As a free-lancer, I am unfettered by grade level or gov reqts & need only follow my students’ -interests for content serving the acquisition of Sp/Fr speaking proficiency. A year ago, the 8y.o.’s were being crushed by new std tests, & loved role-playing extreme & comical versions of exam-administration with stuffed animals. This year the 10y.o. boys are suddenly obsessed w/competitive poker, & stage puppet tournaments bound only by the reqt to say it in Fr/Sp. If you were allowed to work w/a reasonably small # of students, start at their level, use their interests to tweak content, plus clean sturdy building & supplies, minus gov dictating specifics/ speed of acq’n etc, your students might thrive.
In every case in which a child graduates from high school without having FALLEN IN LOVE with some field of endeavor, with some area of learning, WE HAVE FAILED. WE HAVE FAILED THAT CHILD.
I could teach the entire middle-school and high-school curriculum from aboard a sailboat, as part of learning about sailing and boats and the wind and the waves and the weather. It astonishes me how unimaginative some people who are supposed to be educators (uh, thinkers and learners) for a living can be.
Half the boys in the United States are now graduating from high-school having mostly hated it, having learned not to be learners. And the way to fix that is NOT more standardization, more regimentation, more unimaginative, one-size-fits-all thinking.
The girls are doing slightly better. Fewer come out of the system absolutely crushed.
Look, school cannot “teach people what they need to know.” What it can do is create people who are self-motivated learners. Then THEY will learn what they need to know, throughout their lives.
Learning is something you undertake, not something you undergo.
We are treating it like something that kids are to undergo. That’s the real meaning of “rigor” in the Reformish tongue.
As a parent, I have two very different children. One is definitely “college material” in the pre-WWII sense of the word: abstract thinker, well-read, interested in analysis and somewhat physically clumsy. He should have the opportunity, without incurring an enormous debt, to receive the education that will maximize both his personal potential and his value to the community he will grow up into. However, by the end of his 10th grade year, he will already know everything his school system can teach him that will be of value to him, and will twiddle his thumbs waiting to graduate for two years.
The other child is an artistic, hands-on, fidgety nature lover who is not at all prone to abstract thinking. She should also have the opportunity to have the education that will maximize her personal potential and her contributions to society. However, she will spend the bulk of her high school years struggling her way through courses that will be of no value to her and have minimal time to take art, metals, welding, woodworking, agriculture and other courses that may be of real interest and value to her. And using that time to apprentice with local artisans, tradespeople and artists will be out of the question. And all the while, her guidance counselors will be telling her she needs to go to college to succeed, which is not the truth for her.
Unfortunately, our system will shove both of them through the same mold (and this is not all the fault of CC). One child will receive far too little of the academic rigor he will need and the other will be forced to waste her time on abstractions that will never enrich her life or make her more productive.
For your first child you might explore the possibility of taking classes at a local college or university while he is still in high school. My middle son graduated high school having taken 26 credit hours of classes at the local university. Transportation can be an issue, and at least in my state the student is required to pay the tuition, so family income can be a barrier as well. Perhaps an independent study or two would help as well. One of my son’s friends worked his way through Gilbert Strang’s linear algebra course through MIT’s opencourseware.
Getting official certification for both options is a bit of a problem, however. Many colleges and universities are reluctant to give transfer credit to incoming freshman even if the classes did not count towards high school graduation. The issues with online course certification are well known.
Thanks for your suggestions.
I live in a fairly remote area. The nearest university is over an hour’s drive away. However, my son is blessed to be enrolled in a project-based charter school that gives him a tremendous amount of freedom and he is working well above his grade level (8th) in all subject areas. At some point there will be a ceiling to that and we’ll have to look at something like what you’ve suggested.
My daughter will enter 6th grade in the same school, which will give her flexibility to pursue her interests as well. We are very happy that this option exists for us and wish it could be there for everyone.
Thank you, Dave. This is so obvious, and so widespread. The kids are right there in front of us. Differing kids like yours. But the troglodytes on the right and the dimwits on the left seem to be arguing with one another only about HOW STANDARDIZED the curriculum should be–completely standardized or almost completely standardized.
Robert Shepherd – Yes, language acquisition is apparently easy for young children. My father’s native language was German and when he entered the first grade in this country the only word of English he knew was “Hello”. I once remarked to him that it must have been diificult learning English in the first grade. He was surprised by my remark and said that he couldn’t remember the slightest difficulty in learning English. In no time at all he was teaching my grandmother English.
Another interesting thing about speaking a language – my aunt, my father’s sister, took a vacation to Germany when she was about 70. She was like my father a native speaker of German but after leaving home to go to college she used English almost exclusively therafter. When she visited Germany she hadn’t spoken much German in fifty years. She didn’t expect to be able to speak much to the people there but she told me that to her surprise she was very quickly able to easily speak German and that everybody took her for a native. The German she thought she had forgotten was still buried in her brain and flooded right back into her consciousness.
Fascinating, isn’t it? There is a window of opportunity. The brain is an extremely plastic organ. However, two kinds of things seem to happen early on with regard to language. One: lifelong neural pathways are created, like those in your aunt’s mind. Two: pruning of pathways that kids were born with but that weren’t used also occurs. Kids are born with neural machinery capable of learning ANY human language, and then they lose the parts of that machinery not needed for the language that they happen to hear spoken around them. So, for example, the ability to distinguish some phonetic features not found in the native tongue falls off rapidly–kids can hear them and learn to use them but adults can’t even hear them. Pinker gives popular accounts of both in The Language Instinct.
Robert – I don’t know for sure but it is possible thar epigenetics may be involved in the differences between language learning in children and language learning in adults. Epigenetics is not only involved in controlling the differences in gene expression in different tissues but it is also involved in controlling the expression of genes at different life stages. For example humans have coding for three different hemoglobin molecules a fetal form, a juvenile form and an adult form. Epigenetic mechanisms successivey turn the genes for these three types of hemoglobin on and off in a person’s life. Perhaps some genes involved in language learning are turned off after puberty.
This is a fascinating possibility, Jim. We know that these linguistic clocks exist, but we don’t know what their mechanisms are.
I have long said that if I were starting my career over again, today, that I would go into genetics. There is so much of interest happening there right now. Genetics and brain-computer interfaces are going to change everything utterly very, very soon.