Are high school diplomas really meaningless these days? And does that amount to a promise broken by the public school system?
Once considered a springboard to success, the high school diploma now has little meaning in determining whether students are ready for college or work, a coalition of education groups contends.
Only comprehensive change, including more rigorous English and math requirements for all students, would restore the significance of a high school graduation, according to a nearly two-year review by the American Diploma Project.
The project conclusions recommend strengthening exit requirements, including the addition of rigorous English and math courses even for those non-college-prep students; using high school exit exams in addition to grades; encouraging colleges and prospective employers to use high school exit exam scores in admissions and hiring decisions; and, requiring all states to participate in federal 12th-grade reading and math tests.
Depite the mention of employment, many supporters of this type of research believe that high schools should now be geared towards prepare every kid for college:
"We haven't believed that the purpose of high school was to ensure every kid who graduated was ready to do college-level work. That is the big sea change that we're signaling here," said Michael Cohen, the former Clinton adviser and current president of Achieve, a nonprofit dedicated to helping states raise academic standards.
"Whether, as a parent, you think your kid is going to college or the workplace, those kids face the same rigorous demands, and they need to leave with the same core set of skills," he said.
That means all students should learn geometry, data analysis, statistics and advanced algebra, the report says. They also should show strong written and oral communication skills, plus analytic and reasoning ability typically linked with honors courses, it says.
Even if one wanted to argue that not every child should attend college, it's hard to argue against setting high standards for every high school student, in the hopes that even those who don't attend college will not be at a disadvantage in the work force. But there are those who claim that the value of a diploma is not in what students learn, but how hard they work:
David Bloome, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, said the report is not "smacking of reality."
"For a group to come out and say that a high school diploma has lost its meaning strikes me as a difficult position to maintain given how hard so many students work to obtain one," said Bloome, a professor in the College of Education at Ohio State University and a former public school teacher. As examples, he cited students who earn diplomas despite being new to the country, or those who graduate with vocational skills that fully prepare them for work.
That's compassionate, but I'm not sure it's right. Simply because many more less-well-prepared students are flooding the schools doesn't mean (a) that high school diplomas haven't become dumbed down, or (b) that schools should be judging students by how hard they work rather than how much they learn. Ultimately, those students will be judged by the standards of the real world. Shouldn't their high school prepare them for that by raising the standards right off the bat?
Too often higher education institutions and K-12 schools have been silos next to each other, working independent of each other.
"The mentality has been until recently that college was not the goal for everybody, so educators tried to figure out what our kids needed to know to be good solid high school students," Stonewater said.
That's not enough today, as employers and community colleges demand greater skills of students...
Indeed, we often see evidence that students in college-prep courses are not necessarily being prepared for college. The high school diploma has indeed become devalued, in no small part by those who who abhor the idea that any student, even a 17-year-old, should be held to objective standards.
Posted by kswygert at February 11, 2004 03:54 PM