There was an AP article I ran across last week: ‘82 percent of US schools may be labeled ‘failing’. I suspect that there are over a hundred companion pieces and copies of this article online right now…
This piece alludes to the fact that many schools are not coming close to the 2014 math and reading requirements mandated by the No Child Left Behind initiative. There is little stating exactly what these requirements are, as well as what the historical trends are with comparable levels of student accomplishments over the years. And without wanting to beg the question, I still am not really clear as to who came up with what these criteria (who are they, and what are the criteria…). You see, the actual criteria are different in most states…
This would seem to be less an education article than a red meat political piece. This ‘feels’ like chumming the waters looking for sharks (i.e. casting fish guts into the water to attract something big).
It is certainly no surprise to say that the no child left behind act is not a favorite amongst those who work in the education industry (i.e. teachers, and some school administrators), or those to who try to curry favor with this political block. At this level, any unfunded mandate serves to be only another sword of Damocles hanging over schools.
Nonetheless, I find that articles like this…that is, once you get past the inflammatory aspects of them…are sources for a number of reasonable questions about how our education system is working. While this article is certainly guaranteed to get a lot of readers, I wonder if a simple graph of school and student achievement with regard to school’s graduating students, and even some overview of what these students are being tested on would gather as many readers.
I wonder how most people would consider some of these ideas…such as: what are the things you learned in high school…what are the things which were of real value to you, what were the real wastes of time? As you might guess, the potential responses to some questions like this would go all over the map. And while it is a certainty that some students learn much more than some others in a high school environment…what is the baseline of things which any high school graduate should know?
As a bit of a follow up, here is an article which covers some comparable shortcomings in the college industry.
Why Isn’t Our Children Learning?
http://www.themillions.com/2011/03/why-isnt-our-children-learning.html
Anyone who has attended or sent a child to college in the last thirty years has to be asking themselves: what do universities do with all that tuition money? Sure, the dorms are nicer than they used to be and the dining hall food is closer to something a person might actually eat, and, yes, some university presidents are paying themselves like CEOs, but a few new buildings and some overpaid executives cannot possibly cause tuition to rise at four times the rate of inflation for a generation. So, where is all that money going?
These are the obvious questions I have heard for years…except in the media, or answered by colleges….
Not toward making undergraduates smarter, according to a hard-hitting new report, Academically Adrift, by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The authors followed 2,322 students at 24 universities around the U.S. and found that after two years in college, 45 percent of them had made no appreciable progress in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills” – the very things college students are supposed to be learning during their freshman and sophomore years. After four years of college, according to follow-up figures available online, only 36 percent of students made gains in those areas. Perhaps even more damningly, the authors found that these students spent an average of only 27 hours a week on their coursework, down from 40 hours a week in the early 1960s. The average high school kid, the authors say, spends more time on school work than today’s college students do.
I suspect that information like this, when presented this way will be seen as red meat, just like the AP article
