After years of setting “rigorous” requirements, Los Angeles finds that nearly 75% won’t be qualified to graduate. Superintendent Ramon Cortines says it is time to be realistic.
“This has prompted some in the L.A. Unified School District, including Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, to suggest reconsidering the requirements, which were approved a decade ago to better prepare students for college. The plan came after years of complaints that the nation’s second-largest school system was failing to help underprivileged students become eligible for and succeed in college.
“In an interview, Cortines said the effort is laudable, but that it would be unfair to penalize students who otherwise could graduate.
“I do believe the goal is a good one, but we need to be realistic,” Cortines said. Enforcing the plan is “not practical, realistic or fair to the students of 2017. I don’t think we’ve provided the supports to the schools.”
“But the college prep requirements still have significant backing within the district and among community activists, who say L.A. Unified must do a better job helping students pass the challenging classes.”
Many “reformers” think that high expectations are self-fulfilling. The evidence says they are not. Without a host of supports, both in school and outside, students are not able to overcome high hurdles.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Doing our best to waste your money from Chatsworth to San Pedro, to mismanage our personnel from Sylmar to South Gate, to fail your children from Tujunga to Topanga, to serve them lousy food from the mountains to the sea–we are LAUSD.
http://www.examiner.com/public-education-in-los-angeles/stuart-goldurs
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The reason students are not prepared is that up until 9th grade students are socially promoted. In my 8th grade classes many are used to going on to the next grade with little effort and few passing grades. Until the system of social promotion is stopped, students will continue to fail in upper grades. Teachers know the solutions but the solutions are not conducive to politics or big money.
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Research does not support grade retention. It has negative impacts on children’s social, emotional and academic development and increases their likelihood of dropping out.
See retention research here: https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/grade-retention-research/ Be sure to click the top link and read the Resolution on Mandatory Grade Retention and High-Stakes Testing by the National Council on Teachers of English (NCTE).
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This “Dropout Formula” cannot be ignored:
(Age in June of 8th grade: 15) = 85+% dropouts
(Age in June of 8th grade: 16) = 95+% dropouts
Note: Percentages are estimates.
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On very large scales, the TAIL (Teachers, Curriculum, Standards. Tests, Artificial Rigor) will NEVER WAG the DOG (Students, Parents, Culture). Students/Parents are the limiting factor.
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Poverty is the limiting factor.
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I’m terribly sorry that this is not on topic, but Utah, which spends less per pupil than any other state, has just passed a new evaluation system that will only allow teachers to receive “scheduled salary increases” if teachers are ranked proficient or highly proficient. Look for districts to suddenly rank teachers much lower to save money. 20% of our evaluation will be on “student achievement,” and 10% on these idiotic evaluations that students and parents do on teachers.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/2492504-155/utah-school-board-approves-new-teacher
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I WISH our district had student and parent evaluations of teachers. I know it is very subjective, but it seems strange that the voices of people who are directly affected by the teachers aren’t heard at all in the evaluation system.
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These evaluations aren’t particularly well done, though. For parents, there are a total of 8 questions, and 10 for the students. They are all just the basic multiple choice questions (excellent, good, fair, whatever). There’s not even a “not applicable” one for the students, which means they’re judging on homework in PE classes or whatever. And kids as young as Kindergarten have to do it. The one for the younger child does it in colors, and the little ones just choose whatever color they like best, and there is no provision for kids who are color blind. Even the profoundly disabled kids are supposed to evaluate everyone they come in contact with: paraprofessionals, librarians, counselors, etc. It takes two days to get the kids through the process in computer labs (these are all online). And we get very little feedback. The parents barely do the surveys. These are useless.
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I don’t think students (especially young students) really comprehend what makes a good teacher. To them it’s someone who lets them play longer at recess or brings them snacks. My sister is evaluated by parent evals-one bad one brings her whole score down. They say things like the teacher didn’t communicate with them enough and they are the ones who never answer the teacher’s calls.
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Sounds like they are taking their cues from Florida. My former District told the AP’s not dish out too many favorable evaluations for the sole purpose of not having to pay out bonuses. These bonuses are so minute that I don’t know if the word bonus should even be used to describe them.
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How much are the bonuses?
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And in Utah, it’s not even a bonus. It’s a negative consequence–do this or you won’t get a raise.
And yes, The Real One, Florida seems to be the model. We adopted school grades from Florida, too. Only we have no class size limits. I know that Florida ignores them, but in Utah, we don’t even TRY to have limits. I have a colleague who teaches special education math, and has classes as high as 29.
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The Common Core expectations will never be met in LA County Schools. They are too rigorous and unrealistically so for a population with more than 30 percent ELL students. If the authors of the Common Core would have just asked teachers from LA county for their input well then we might have had a fighting chance with a fair and developmentally appropriate test. This was not the case. Many reformers were Ivy League educated easterners who had NO CLUE about the Southwestern states and the hurdles they must overcome in order to close the achievement gap between white and Latino children. I am an advocate for ELL children and I am certain that what they need most are classes for the parents to attend where they can learn about college requirements and k-12 academic expectations. Many are continually left in the dark due to language barriers. Class size is too big in Southern California schools. This prevents the teachers from addressing culturally sensitive issues. Reduce class size, bring in parent education classes and get rid of the Common Core expectations. If 80 percent of white children are failing these test then how in the world can ELL children succeed?
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I cannot speak to the specific issues in your part of the country, but I do know that here on the east coast (New Jersey) most districts have large numbers of ELL students as well.
Every city or town in America has unique set of challenges, and I do not for one minute think that I know the exact nature of what you deal with on a daily basis. Rest assured however that we DO understand the difficulties associated with having many ELL learners in a classroom.
On my grade level this year more than half of our students come from homes where English is not spoken.
Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic, to name just a few. Many of the parents do not speak English at all, so they do not attend meetings or school functions. They are unable to support their children at home, nor are they able to ask for help. We do have people to reach out and translate to the Spanish speaking families, but not to the others.
The main issue for me personally is that the tests, as well as the programs that support them, are just ridiculous. It has been well established that neither are developmentally appropriate for anyone.
That’s pretty much the whole point.
Any student with any kind of issue, be it an ELL issue, a learning issue, an emotional issue, poverty (and we have no shortage of these issues here in the east)…is of course at a tremendous disadvantage. But these tests are not fair tools with which to measure ANYTHING meaningful about ANY child.
We have ALL (teachers and students across the country) been set up to fail. It has everything to do with money, and sadly nothing to do with educating children.
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. . . the tests, as well as the programs that support them, are just ridiculous. It has been well established that neither are developmentally appropriate for anyone. . . But these tests are not fair tools with which to measure ANYTHING meaningful about ANY child.”
It is well established (by Noel Wilson) that the programs (educational standards) and tests (standardized) are COMPLETELY INVALID and do not measure anything. Which points to one of the basic fundamental problems in education today: that the teaching and learning process cannot be “measured” in any way shape or form. So many deforms and conventional malpractices are premised on attempting to “measure that process. Start with crap end with crap.
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The parents of English Language Learners need better support in the system. They need special counselors and parent education courses which show them what the grade level expectation are. They have been asking for this but most districts are not delivering. They need more resources and parent representatives at each school site to meet with principals on a regular basis. Until these goals are met the achievement gap can not be bridged. The Common Core test has made home life absolute hell for these parents. I hear complaints daily from teary eyed parents who are entirely confused by the new methods and execution of Language Arts and Math. The parents are stressed and the children are feeling the heat. David Coleman if you are reading this I’d like you to reconsider everything!
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Many ELLs in my school are not receiving federally mandated ESL/Bilingual services.
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Time to return to realistic segmentation of our urban public school market with different graduation requirements, expectations and goals – vocational schools, comprehensive schools, magnet schools, selective schools for the GT, bilingual schools for migrants, art and dance schools for the poets, (I wont mention “drop out schools”, the juvi schools and others down th epipeline, as everyone wants to hide this reality from the picture). No school system, with the resource levels currently provided, and the reality of socioeconomic inequity this country suffees from, will be able to build an effective, purely egalitarian, mix all students, nest for democracy comprehensive school that educates well all kinds of students. This has never happened at scale, anywhere. If we could outgrow our ridiculous and impossible college bound goal, we might be able to focus on more critical issues and challenges.
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Yes, excellent ideas.
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The Common Core is stressing out the immigrant families like you wouldn’t believe! There, enough said!
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Well sorry one more thing. East Coast educators and Ivy League Academics you could never understand the issues we have in the Southwest with educating English Language Learners. You will never know unless you live here for one year at least how wide the cultural divide is. Before you determine you know how to close the gap come live, stay work and play in this wonderfully diverse but complex area of the states. We have a vibrant, alive and colorful immigrant population but the numbers are almost impossible to manage and most have fallen through the cracks. The apathy is great and efforts by those who can make a difference are sluggish at best.
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Yes, I agree. Bring back the trade schools! I work in an industry where I rely heavily on the men and women in building and manufacturing trades. Some are more prosperous than my friends who have Bachelors and Masters degrees. College is not the end all! And while I adored college I realize it truly is not for everyone. I can accept this. Why is it so hard for the “Reformers” to accept it.
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“….not provided supports” understates the problem by a wide margin. Nor is the problem restricted to poverty and the challenges students face in their neighborhoods. Class sizes have been huge for years, cutting down on the amount of attention students receive. Cuts were made to support personnel, like librarians, counsellors, and social workers. Intervention has been inadequate when students fell behind, whatever the reason.
NCLB killed innovative programs, like Humanitas (which I taught in for 12 years in South LA) as schools fell under sanctions for low test scores on the CSTs, tests that many students made no effort on, because if they did not try, then they hadn’t failed, and failure was not something they could bear.
Cortines is right, but for the wrong reasons. It is wrong to punish students, whose lives are hard enough, and who may be the first in their families to graduate from high school, for the failures and malign neglect of the District.
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The policies of the self-proclaimed ‘education reform” movement are the product of the intersection of the “hard bigotry of mandated failure” with the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Why do I write that? Because no matter how well public school teachers and students do, any result that doesn’t meet the bigoted low expectations of the rheephormsters automatically means raising the test score bar until massive failure is guaranteed.
That is, in the circus fun house world of rheephorm where words and deeds are mirror opposites, the overwhelming emphasis in practice (as opposed to rhetoric) is on FAILURE not SUCCESS. Education triage is their standing order: low-level skills and obedience training for the minority of “strivers” and being cast aside and abandoned for the “non-striver” majority.
Think I am exaggerating? Hyperbole? Read Valerie Strauss today, where she highlights a conversation on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” about public education with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and his sidekick Charlie Munger—
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/05/08/what-are-bill-gates-and-warren-buffet-talking-about/
From the end of the article:
[start]
And then there were comments from Munger, in which he says that McDonald’s, the fast-food chain, does a fantastic job of educating “troubled” young people to be “good citizens” — even better than charter schools do (a statement at which Gates sort of nods his head and smiles).
“It’s fun by the elite academic types in America to say McDonald’s is the wrong kind of food and its the wrong kind of this, and the jobs don’t pay very much and so forth. I have quite a very different view. I think McDonald’s is one of the most successful educational institutions in the United States. They take people and give them a first job which enables them to get a second job. They do a very, very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens. And they are probably more successful than charter schools. So I am a big fan of McDonald’s.”
At this point Buffett seems to support the analysis of McDonald’s as a great educational institution, saying that he stops by a particular McDonald’s restaurant for breakfast on many mornings and he has gotten to know some of the workers. He noted that they “have to be there at a certain time, they have to learn how to count money, price items, and they have to learn how to smile at people.” Maybe he doesn’t know that not all cash registers tell the employee exactly how much money to return to the customer, and that not everyone who works in McDonald’s actually smiles at customers.
Munger, who donates to higher education, then makes it a point to say that he doesn’t spend his time trying to improve troubled K-12 schools because he “tires easily” and he isn’t “any good at constant failure.” He adds: “You have to be a saint or a Gates to do that.”
I suppose you could also be someone who simply cares about the future of public education, the most important civic institution in the United States, such as the millions of parents, teachers and others who work to make public schools better.
[end]
You read that right.
Do we now have to start calling him Saint Gates like some folks refer to Saint Eva?
As for me, given how he and his handlers responded to even the mildest questions in the interview by Lindsey Layton [no offense intended to Ms. Layton], I think I’ll stick with—
Petulant Bill.
Or Hollow Bill. All that big talk and there’s nothing in it.
Zero. Nada. Nil. Zilch.
And we didn’t have to wait ten years [thank you, Mr. Gates!] to find that out.
😎
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Remember back during NCLB in NYS when the scores actually went up on the assessments due to a large concerted effort by the teachers? Guess what? That was unacceptable and the cut scores were raised (after the test was given) so that those who were now passing would be failing again. Not only that, but the passing rate was set so high that students who were formerly on level were now below and those who exceeded the norm were just average.
Of course, things went downhill from there after the introduction of CC.
So those in NYS who have been paying attention realuze the system has been rigged.
Now what are they going to do with a whole generation of students who have been labeled substandard that won’t be allowed to graduate from high school and can’t pass the re formulated Common Core GED?
Ellen #TearsAndFears
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“Remember back during NCLB in NYS when the scores actually went up on the assessments due to a large concerted effort by the teachers?”
When was this?
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About four years ago. The state said the scores were too high so they upped the ante. Everybody was upset, but they buckled down to try again. Then Common Core came along and things got even worse.
That’s why I made the joke:
In 3rd Grade my grand daughter scored a high three (NCLB)
In 4th Grade she scored a high two (realigned test score)
By 5th grade she was down to a mid one (CC)
And in 6th and 7th (this year) she opted out – so call it a zero
I guess that means that each year she attends school she gets more stupid.
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http://nypost.com/2009/08/13/toughen-the-tests/
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This is an interesting commentary by Diane from 2009. I wonder if she still feels the same way. I proctored those tests and the reason the scores were weighted was because the difficulty increased (plus the Regents requirements now applied to ALL not just some of the students). Wasn’t the goal of NCLB to get more kids to pass? I worked with those kids in Buffalo and we pulled out all the stops to raise those scores.
Of course, the stakes are that much higher now. And even more impossible. We need to revamp the entire system and go “retro” or “pre-NCLB”. When home schooling starts to look good – then you know there’s a problem with public education.
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And the only reason we know this is because the union contract strongly protects teachers control over grading but I can tell you we are strongly pressured to grade inflate and blamed if too many students fail. Administrators always talk about “rigor” in lessons but don’t want to hold students to that standard. Then they blame teachers for failing students.
In addition, LAUSD students are the largest group to drop out of college. This is due to the constant upheaval and mismanagement of the district and various fads and schemes forced on teachers.
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Barbara: if I understand you correctly, an excellent example of Campbell’s Law.
Or as Dr. Raj Chetty, one of the leading numbers & stats folks of the self-proclaimed education reform” movement put it in the Vergara Trial, “Campbell’s Conjecture.”
I’ll stick with Campbell’s Law. For example, when it comes to cooking the VAM-derived ratings for teachers using the infamous ‘multiple measures’ approach, from Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s RETHINKING VALUE-ADDED MODELS IN EDUCATION (2014, pp. 44-45):
[start]
These and other HISD teachers also noted that their supervisor were skewing their observational scores to match their value-added scores given external pressures to do so…
One teacher stated: Here’s the problem: No principal wants to be called in by the superintendent or another superior and [asked], “How come your teachers show negative growth but you have high evaluations on them? Are you doing your job? I don’t understand. Your teacher shows no growth but you have [marked them] as exceeding expectations all up and down the chart?” Now it’s not just this [sic] data over here that’s gonna harm us, it’s the principals [who are] adjusting our data over there to match the EVAAS®. So it looks like they’ re being consistent.
Another teacher agreed: “Well my evaluation were fine, but of course now they have to make the evaluation match the EVAAS®. We now to have go through that”…
Another teacher wrote: They’re not going to bat [for us, although] a few of them will. But most of them are going to go in there, and they’re going to create a teacher evaluation that reflects the [EVAAS®] data because they don’t want to have to explain, again and again, why they’re giving high classroom observation assessments when the data shows [sic] that the teacher is low performing. …
Another note: Our principal pressures us. You bet she pressures. If you don’t [make EVAAS®], then it goes against you in your PDAS. In a roundabout way she finds a way to put that against you. …
Another noted: My boss had to go to the district superintendent and explain why we needed to be kept, when ultimately the data showed that we weren’t good teachers … [However] you’ve got other good teachers whoa re being thrown under the bus because of this system.
… HISD teachers also described how principals would switch their PDAS scores to match their EVAAS® scores if dissimilar, mainly because they believed their administrators held the opinion that the EVAAS® estimates were superior and should trump the more subjective PDAS scores…
[end]
HISD = Houston Independent School District. EVAAS = Education Value-Added Assessment System. PDAS = Professional Development and Appraisal System.
They’ll get you coming. They’ll get you going.
In plain English: if you don’t want to get sucker punched, then consider following the example of Mary King, posting today on this blog.
Everyone must make her or his own decisions but they can take away your honor and your self-respect only if you let them.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
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KTA
Whatever happened to your “Houston Miracle”?
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That’s a great line, “High expectations are not self-fulfilling.”
A worthy bumper sticker.
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Agreed, and worthy of the categorization, “asinine”.
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Clarification: The idea that high expectations will automatically result in higher achievement is asinine.
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I wonder what happens if they don’t graduate.
Do they stay another year, enrolled in HS and give it a second go? That large a cohort of kids would strain the district if they had to stay, or if they just had the option to stay.
Or are they just cut loose, and directed to the nearest Pearson testing center to attempt the Pearson GED?
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If it’s in Missouri, more likely than not they would stay if they chose as the MO Constitution provides for a free and appropriate education up to a person turning 21.
Think of the strain on the resources were that to happen.
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So graduation requirement = college ready? Really? So kids who don’t plan to go on to college shouldn’t be able to graduate high school? Just wow.
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My plumber did not go to college. I shelled out a tidy sum for his last three hour visit with his helper. It looks like I may be the one who made the wrong career choices. Does he lie awake nights wondering if any of his kids are getting shot? Does society hold him accountable?
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How to judge No Child Left Behind policy, for kids who spent 13 years in it? 25% is close to 100% with a little round off error.
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Yeah, that’s right, just round to the nearest 100th, I mean 100.
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When I was teaching in a neighboring distict to LAUSD, the state came up with this requirement: every 8th grader was required to take Algebra! It didn’t matter if they were ready to take algebra! This one size fits all was thought up by some politician. That was 12 years ago and it may be the same today. Prior to that, some 5th -8th graders would walk the two blocks to the high school and take Algebra 1. I only had one fifth grader who finished all of his high school math requirements before he entered 9th grade.
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District
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There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Know nots who know not they know not but are absolutely certain they know when empowered … Make up your own ending. It ain’t good.
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These dismal results are exactly what the “reformers” want. By continuing to move the goalposts to where more and more age-inappropriate curriculum is being crammed down the throats of children, beginning in kindergarten, they guarantee more students will not graduate.
That’s the plan of the neoliberals in their demented fantasies of globalization. One of the aims is to limit higher education for the masses, higher education here referring to high school. Those who can’t cut it will be forced into sweatshops in order to “compete” with China or Vietnam.
I fully expect a push to reinstitute child labor in this country.
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Arne Duncan must be just thrilled over this news. How sad that the failure of so many children was engineered by adults who publicly claim to care about them, when their concerns are really about promoting profiteering, destroying public education and producing an ignorant citizenry who will kowtow to elite overlords and never vote.
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You don’t ever hear about this alarming statistic, from the World Bank, but it’s likely to worsen here under these circumstances: “Highest Elementary School Drop-out Rates (Male)” http://www.ranker.com/list/highest-elementary-school-drop-out-rates-_male_/ceorick
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Note to the NY State and US DoE:
Raise the bar on how you plan to raise the bar first before setting goals you haven’t the slightest idea how to achieve.
No more stories about building planes in the air, the need for delay after delay because everything is being gunned and rigged, how we can overcome poverty, illness or other adversity by making no excuses, the validity of VAM, the validity of Pearson tests, the validity of the uninsightful organizational mania of Danielson as an assessment tool, the significance of graduation rates in this era of credit inflation, college un-readiness and burgeoning student loan debt.
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There are certain basic, commonsense principles of education. This is true for the informal cultural education that one receives at home and, hopefully, from one’s community, including the vital acquisition of the first language and a basic ethical framework. This is also true for the formal, structured education that one receives, again hopefully, in the schools and colleges, building on the base of the informal one.
To understand these principles, one does not have to go to Teachers College at Columbia U., or get a graduate degree.
Every mother who has helped her children learn to speak the mother tongue, or has has helped guide them to distinguish between right and wrong, knows instinctively how to do this. She might not always be able to express this in speech.
It is in modern times, with all the stresses and distractions and breaks in community and culture that these have brought, that this basic informal education has been disrupted.
To perhaps a lesser extent, every sincere teacher and sincere student who has taught in or attended a functioning school or college, and struggled to teach and to learn, knows, although they might not be able to express it, what these basic principles are as applied to formal, structured education, including the propagation of the classical disciplines,
I do not wish to go into a detailed listing and explanation of these principles here. But among them, in the case of formal, structured education, one would have to include things like:
respect, trust, sincerity and integrity;
purpose;
desire and choice,;
sequence;
time and pacing;
focus;
feedback and correction;
habituation and practice;
diligence;
questioning, reflection and exploration;
application;
and, of course, some ongoing success, without which it is difficult to progress.
It is these principles, and other basic, commonsense things, that seem to be not taken into account by those who plan and implement the top-down “reforms” that usually do far more harm than good. In particular, there are two glaring zones of neglect:
— a) disregard of the specialized methods, tools and languages of the formal disciplines, which have managed to propagate themselves, often over thousands of years, without help from either schools of education or corporate reformers;
–b) disregard of the human aspects of teaching and learning.
The last has been the hallmark of the new wave of corporate reformers and their allies.
Teaching and learning take place best in an atmosphere of relaxed attention. It is this atmosphere that breeds creativity and that gives students and teachers the motivation, indeed the pleasure and joy, that they need in order to continue on what can at times be, even in the best of circumstances, a difficult, arduous struggle.
Fear, intimidation, insecurity, instability, impossible time-pressures — these are not things that are desirable or productive in places of teaching and learning.
One should not bring the essentially violent struggle for survival that we see in wars and in certain financial and business operations into the homes and classrooms, which should be zones of tranquility and nurturing. It is bad enough that most of our schools have operated for long as factories, where the teachers are treated as factory workers tend to be the world over, and the children are seen in the same light. There is no need to further descend into hell by bringing into the schools the ruthless calculus of the Wall Streeters.
Even hyenas and lions behave much differently with their young than when chasing down their prey.
This is not to say young children do not need gentle, yet firm discipline. They often do. Teachers and school administrators also need to be held accountable for what they do. But there are ways to do this that are reasonable and not fear-inducing.
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Embed the system with an assumption of full collaboration with families and then put a price on what that costs. Anything that doesn’t fully incorporate the participation and collaboration of families – including developing families to support the healthy brain development of their kids – is going to leave most kids behind. Witness the war on poverty since Johnson. The government cannot and should not tout that they can get this done in spite of the failure of families and communities because that is a lie.
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What I want to know is when high school became college prep school? Just because you graduate from high school doesn’t mean you have to go to college. Why can’t it be a separate achievement? A high school diploma is an admirable accomplishment, but now it has been relegated to a college stepping stone. The two are not necessarily the same – nor should they be.
So to quote Little Abner – “Put “Em back the way they was”.
Ellen #WorseOffNowThanBefore
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Limited English students take from five to ten years to learn academic English – according to research. Research by professionals – not reformers who are determined to push round pegs into square holes with a sledgehammer and call it progress.
I wish everyone could see how my students try and work. They need more support and time. They have much to offer as we spend all our time telling them they are not like white kids who know English and can pass.
Los Angeles has a lot in common with Vegas with a majority minority and thousands of limited English learners living in communities drenched in poverty.
It’s mighty fine to preach from the capital about rigor. Until you see that rigor ruining people and cutting off all opportunity. Pedestals that high up in the sky sometimes obstruct the view.
We are not all going to college. We cannot all pass a test. That doesn’t make my students less human or invaluable within my community. Talents of a diverse variety are innate in my students who will never do well on these tests. I do not want to be the one that fails them because I can never record in a database how beautiful and talented they really are.
Creating a caste system by testing and failing kids who tried their best does what exactly? Failing an entire city like Vegas or Los Angeles proves we are racist pigs and that is all.
Shame shame shame.
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Going through the responses to this article was rather interesting, as many of them don’t actually address the article. ??
I’m a teacher in one district and also sit on the board of the largest school district in my county. Our superintendent, and a few other board members, are advocating the A-G curriculum. 4 of our comprehensive high schools no longer offer non-academic classes, something we did NOT vote on.
My problems with an A-G curriculum are multiple. Instituting a policy like this at the end of a school career is ridiculous, it should start with lots of support at the elementary level. Not all students are cut out for a 4 year college right after high school, for a variety of reasons. This requirement also says (basically) that community colleges are not worthwhile, nor are careers that don’t require a college degree. Some students simply don’t have the cognitive ability to succeed in these classes. And what of the SPED kids, or ELLs?
I also believe that the problem of grade inflation is exacerbated by an A-G requirement. I’ve had some teachers tell me that a honors class at one school may be more akin to a regular academic class at another school. Our local California State University says that too many of their freshman students need remediation upon entering the campus. What does that mean then, about the education they received? Their A-G classes?
Proponents of A-G act as if the ONLY alternative to this is tracking. This is a false comparison. Tracking is wrong, and has been shown to happen disproportionately to students of color, regardless of their abilities. So tackle this problem without creating another one.
8th graders and 9th graders should have in depth conversations about college and what’s needed to get there. In the end, their talents and abilities, with their and their parents’ input, should be used to plan out a post-high school scenario.
In the end, I don’t want to read any more about rigor or lack of rigor, and yes, Diane you’re absolutely right- too many believe that “high expectations are self-fulfilling.” These are band-aid answers to deeper and bigger problems.
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