One of our educational contributors, Anne Marie Banfield, decided to give this article talking about NH letting kids graduate REAL early from High school a good fisking. There are a lot of ideas and plans out there – do they measure up and are they sufficiently rigorous enough to provide a quality education for our kids. Decide for yourself!
Should Kids Be Able to Graduate After 10th Grade?
By KATHLEEN KINGSBURY Kathleen Kingsbury – Fri Nov 7, 4:50 am ET
High school sophomores should be ready for college by age 16. That’s the message from New Hampshire education officials, who announced plans Oct. 30 for a new rigorous state board of exams to be given to 10th graders.
My concern would be, is it really a rigorous exam. The state exams based on the state standards are not what one would consider rigorous, so much of this depends on what they use as an assessment. I’d be skeptical knowing the bar is set so low with the standards in math and science.
Students who pass will be prepared to move on to the state’s community or technical colleges, skipping the last two years of high school.
How do they know this? Many kids graduate right now who are not prepared for college because they are placed in remedial classes. Again, I’d be skeptical especially knowing they are missing out on two years of additional instruction compared to their peers.
Once implemented, the new battery of tests is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects,
Guaranteed? How?? Who will be the person determining that these are truly higher expectations in competency of core school subjects?
lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams – which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests – as many times as they need to pass.
Lower drop out rates because they are leaving school early with the blessing of the district. What are the chances of a 9th or 10th grader passing an AP exam? And in all core subjects? Is this going to be the assessment given to 10th graders? In order to graduate early? It says..MAY and MODELED on existing AP or IB test. Will they actually be watered down? Or on the AP level? ie..authentic!
Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year.
WAIT, I thought the first set was difficult. Now they are saying these are MORE difficult? Raising the standards for those who actually graduate means lowering the standards for those who graduate early. That clearly lowers the bar for the early graduates
"We want students who are ready to be able to move on to their higher education," says Lyonel Tracy, New Hampshire’s Commissioner for Education. "And then we can focus even more attention on those kids who need more help to get there."
Sounds like cost cutting. Get the kids out of the way. Chances are if these kids are so smart by 10th grade, there isn’t much the teachers and schools have to do, other than correct their papers.
But can less schooling really lead to better-prepared students at an earlier age? Outside of the U.S., it’s actually a far less radical notion than it sounds. Dozens of industrialized countries expect students to be college-ready by age 16, and those teenagers consistently outperform their American peers on international standardized tests.
YES, they actually have a rigorous curriculum unlike much of the fuzzy curriculum in the school right now. It’s like comparing apples to oranges. If this was such a great idea, we’d have home-school kids doing this. Although I think you can find some that do graduate early because so many home-school programs are rich in acaemics, normally they have to go through 11th grade, if I’m not mistaken. The public schools come no where near offering the same kind of quality in their academics and test scores have proven that year after year as home-school kids outperform public school kids.
With its new assessment system, New Hampshire is adopting a key recommendation of a blue-ribbon panel called the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce. In 2006, the group issued a report called Tough Choices or Tough Times , a blueprint for how it believes the U.S. must dramatically overhaul education policies in order to maintain a globally competitive economy. "Forty years ago, the United States had the best educated workforce in the world," says William Brock, one of the commission’s chairs and a former U.S. Secretary of Labor. "Now we’re No. 10 and falling."
Sounds like more of the school-to-work mentality that has been disastrous when implemented in the past. It’s more about supplying a workforce than it is about educating students. Who is public education working for? The students and parents, or corporations?
As more and more jobs head overseas, Brock and others on the commission can’t stress enough how dire the need is for educational reform. "The nation is running out of time," he says.
SIMPLE…then improve the academic curriculum. Throw out the fuzzy and political stuff and teach them! What many graduates lack are basic skills in language arts, mathematics and other core subjects. You can’t tell me that pulling them out early and denying them the last 2 years of education, somehow benefits the student. It may benefit the unskilled workforce employers.
New Hampshire’s announcement comes as Utah and Massachusetts declared that they, too, plan to enact some of the commission’s other proposals, such as universal Pre-K
Studies just came out that showed no significant value in universal pre-k other than it costs us money. A 4 year old is only capable of learning algebra. In the 50′s when we had NO pre-school, students graduated high school with the equivalent of a college education today. (read the Hirsch book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them).
and better teacher pay and training. Still more states are expected to sign on in December. And the largest teacher union in the U.S., the National Education Association, is encouraging its affiliates to support such efforts.
There ya go. You know it’s bad news if the NEA endorses it. The NEA looks out for it’s union membership, not the students or parents in the schools.
Some reform advocates would like to see the report’s testing proposals replace current No Child Left Behind legislation. "It makes accountability much more meaningful by stressing critical thinking and true mastery," says Tracy.
How? right now NCLB holds the schools accountable if the students do not meet state standards when the kids take the TEST. Now they want to shift it to the students, which is ok by me to a certain degree, they should have some sort of knowledge upon graduation, but again is he saying no diploma without mastering certain skills and knowledge? Who sets that bar? We already know the bar is SO low in NH. We are going to trust these same people to set that bar for this??
No date has been set for when New Hampshire will start administering the new set of exams, which have yet to be developed. But to achieve the goal of sending kids to college at 16, Tracy and his colleagues recognize preparation will have to start early. Nearly four years ago, New Hampshire began an initiative called Follow the Child. Starting practically from birth, educators are expected to chart children’s educational progress year to year. In the future, this effort will be bolstered by formalized curricula that specify exactly what kids should know by the end of each grade level.
Again, this depends on what is expected at each level. For instance, E. D. Hirsch has written a Core Knowledge Curriculum and what each child should know at each grade level. IF this were to follow the Core Knowledge model, it would make sense…although I believe it goes through 12th grade and I’m not convinced the same ideologues would embrace a Core Knowledge curriculum.
That should help minimize the need for review year to year. It will also bring New Hampshire’s education framework much closer to what occurs in many high-performing European and Asian nations. "It’s about defining what lessons students should master and then teaching to those points," says Marc Tucker, co-chair of the commission and president of the National Center for Education and the Economy in Washington. "Kids at every level will be taking tough courses and working hard."
Marc Tucker was the Clinton education guru who promoted programs like school to work and outcome based education. Both have been proven failures as far as improving academics among the student body. The mission of the schools for Tucker was to take schools FROM teaching academic basics and knowledge to training students to serve the global economy which would be selected by workforce boards. Follow the Child would serve this purpose well. . .
Right now, Tucker argues, most American teenagers slide through high school, viewing it as a mandatory pit stop to hang out and socialize. Of those who do go to college, half attend community college. So Tucker’s thinking is why not let them get started earlier? If that happened nationwide, he estimates the cost savings would add up to $60 billion a year. "All money that can be spent either on early childhood education or elsewhere," he says.
SCHOOL TO WORK
Critics of cutting high school short, however, worry that proposals such as New Hampshire’s could exacerbate existing socioeconomic gaps. One key concern is whether test results, at age 16, are really valid enough to indicate if a child should go to university or instead head to a technical school – with the latter almost certainly guaranteeing lower future earning potential. "You know that the kids sent in that direction are going to be from low-income, less-educated families while wealthy parents won’t permit it," says Iris Rotberg, a George Washington University education policy professor, who notes similar results in Europe and Asia. She predicts, in turn, that disparity will mean "an even more polarized higher education structure – and ultimately society – than we already have."
It’s a charge that Tracy denies. "We’re simply telling students it’s okay to go at their own pace," he says. Especially if that pace is a little quicker than the status quo.
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