by David Safier
It's true, we're graduating a sizable number of high school students whose academic skills are low. It's also true, a sizable number of students have lousy attitudes toward school.
But here's something most people forget, or don't know: Those low skilled, bad attitude kids would have dropped out if they had been in school 40 or more years ago.
The moral of the story: If you want guaranteed higher achievement, kick the low achievers out of school.
Yeah, yeah, I know. We want to raise students' achievement, not kick them out. I agree. But if current education trends continue, putting greater emphasis on high stakes tests to determine graduation and making those tests more rigorous (and the tests will get more rigorous in the next few years unless something changes) will result in fewer students graduating.
People like to talk about how much more serious students were back when they were in school, and how much "smarter" they were. Some of those people attended schools in reasonably affluent neighborhoods and/or they were in college prep classes, so their concepts of what students were like are skewed. But still, they're at least partially right, especially if they graduated before 1970. Students were more serious, and possibly "smarter" back then, because the less serious, educationally challenged students dropped out.
Look at the chart. In 1940, just under 25% of the adult population had high school diplomas. In 1970, the number was just over half. It wasn't until the mid 1970s that our graduation rates reached the level they are today — a bit above 80%. (The numbers on the chart are a bit deceptive because they include all adults, including older people who went to school — or dropped out — decades earlier. The graduation rate hit about 80% in the late 1960s/early 1970s and hasn't moved a whole lot since then).
For the past few decades, we've been trying to do something that has never been tried before: get all students to graduate high school. That includes students with learning disabilities, most of whom would have dropped out by the 8th grade in earlier decades. They're still in school, demanding a great deal of time and resources. It means students who have bad attitudes are counseled to stay in school, suspended then brought back to school, expelled then urged to re-register, and so on. That's lots of time and money spent on students who are likely to bring down the achievement curve.
(Question #1: Which students were the most likely to drop out when graduation rates were low? Answer: Students from lower income families. Question #2: Which students are most represented in the low performing groups? Same answer: Students from lower income families.)
We're expending phenomenal amounts of money and energy trying to keep the hardest-to-teach students in school. And when you see the "Public schools stink" documentaries, those are always the students who are spotlighted.
In a perfect world, we want to raise low performing students' achievement. In the real world, closing the achievement gap will take years, more likely decades, and it will never be completely successful (I'm not being cynical here. I'm just being honest). In the meantime, if we keep raising "standards," we're going to see our high school attendance and graduation rates drop.
For the record, I want as many students stay in school as possible. I taught lots of students who might have dropped out if they weren't helped along, then woke up in their junior and senior years and performed admirably.
Though they will say I'm wrong, the truth is, conservative educators and many of their corporate philanthropic sponsors would be happy to see graduation rates drop or place the lowest performing students in low cost, low education holding facilities. Progressives who believe the No Child Left Behind protestestations of conservatives are, unfortunately, enabling their agenda are helping move education in the wrong direction.
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wanumba, you’ve wandered too far astray, and you clearly are more interested in what you have to say than what I posted or others are commenting. This comment is gone. Enough.
David Safier
If our schools are so bad, why is it that students from all over the world want to attend colleges here? Coming from a family boasting four generations of teachers, I’ve observed too many many factors in the downgrading of our public schools. Our American “pop culture” contributes to the negative attitude that many students have about learning. Contrasting our society with others, teachers are not as respected here as they are elsewhere — and as they were here generations ago. Then there are parents who (for a variety of reasons) have a warped view of their own kids and of education. Quick example: One parent who upon hearing that his eighth grade son had acted defiantly said, “Just tell me if he does that again and I’ll bang his head against the wall!”
David is right about keeping kids in school beyond their endurance. They lower their scores and gain little. Schools need to adopt a different curriculum for the would-be drop-outs. Teach them a skill and good citizen values at least. Too many drop-outs end up in trouble.
David, you and Phillip D are right on the mark!
Wanumba needs a lesson in reasoning. His (her?) reasoning would lead me to conclude that all baseball players are successful because I saw one of them hit a homer. It also seems to be the case that Wanumba thinks their kids hit a homer when they scored after being born on third base.
I suspect you all would agree that the USA might do better if we “threw some money at the problem”. We’ve tried the opposite.
wanumba, you brag about the education of your children. Please ask them to read my entire post, including the last few paragraphs, and explain to you how I have framed the argument. Either you’re being purposely obtuse, or your reading comprehension skills need work.
Your quote: “The moral of the story: If you want guaranteed higher achievement, kick the low achievers out of school.”
I have objected because (to pick one subject) the entire four years math classes of the three local high schools around here could be labeled, “low achievers” but the problem really is they have a crappy math curriculum (AIMS) that doesn’t allow for mastery of the concepts. The students fall further behind every year because math requires building on earlier concepts. If the early concepts are not taught, it’s impossible to understand the later ones. Their transcipts LOOK good, but they don’t own the skills. They are not equipped to succeed in college or any trade that requires math skills of any kind. One of our local McDonalds literally had to close its doors for an hour when the computer frizzed. I was there that morning and witnessed it, the only one who spoke to them to find out what the matter was. The staff, all long past high school grads, could not ADD up the orders. Arithmetic. It’s the cheapest subject in the world to teach but they didn’t have it. They really wanted to sell all that food, they weren’t shirkers, but they were totally stymied by simple math. McDonalds actually lost hundreds of dollars from their busy morning rush hour business because of a lack of adding skills. Too slave to the computer and calculator. I can attest that a Indian shopkeeper in New Delhi with no electricity at his shop has better math skills than that. I watched him – a marvel with a pencil and paper. Yet, he’s poor, but practice makes perfect.
There are indeed troublemakers who have no business in a classroom, but a huge number of “low achievers” are that way because of lazy “facilitating” instead of teaching, and poor curriculum. It’s a fast statistical fix to throw out the low scorers and by that the low scores – yes indeed then the next averaged scores will shoot up, but it’s just a short-term gimmick, a kicking the can down the road, like political pressure to make the SAT simpler.
Your comments about the TIMSS? From personal experience in a multitude of schools at various grades, I can attest as a primary source that despite the demurring of various AMerican educators who have a vested interest in not having it looked at too closely, the international testing of the TIMSS is a very reliable indicator of how poor American performance is compared to a lot of other countries. Americans today literally do not have anywhere near the level of math and science at each grade that is routine in other countries. We have watched plenty of upper middle class families -well-educated professional parents – try to switch their kids to the European system and fail, their kids did not have the skills – already behind in as early as second grade, and no way can “poor” or “dysfunctional family” be the reasons. I could put the 5th grade French math book in front of an American senior high school student and they would not know how to solve the geometry problem on page three. I HAVE done just that, just to see. I have the book, I got some high schoolers and watched the color drain out of their faces when they saw the problem, and then the grade level it was meant for. The European textbooks BTW are less than half the thickness and weight of American textbooks, a bonus for the aching backs of AMerican students.
There’s plenty of built-in cheating gimmicks already in the standardized testing to massage the scores, so I totally agree that more demands for more testing is the wrong approach. It’s really sad to see ethics being taught in universities, but not applied through the standardized testing system in the education sector. As Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.”
wanumba, you need to read the post a bit more carefully. I absolutely am not suggesting we cull schools of low achievers.
Good education is the number one lifter of people out of poverty by enabling them to get higher level work and pay.
Now ya’ll suggest that our schools need to be ‘culled’ of low achievers? Really? A bit harsh and absolutely targets the poorest from disfunctional homes, condemning them to stay there.
Ya’ll would have booted out our kids because when they came back from Africa, and went to school in America for the first time; they failed their first year. They had the exact same profile as Hispanic students, the SAME handicaps in bi-lingualism. They could speak fluently in two languages, but had only done their school work in French. It took them a YEAR to learn to read and write English well enough to begin bringing their grades up to average. By the third year, they were top of their classes, leaving behind the students who had six years of English schooling more then they did. They’ve since skipped grades and graduated early – the curriculum is too easy.
The European standard academic skills of writing, note-taking, classroom decorum, reading, memorization and higher level mathematics served them well in catching up to their age-mates and then PASSING them.
To say American teachers were CLUELESS, even AFTER extensive hand-holding, guidance and explanations is an understatement.
The trendy conventional wisdom being promoted is that performance is based on “intelligence” or “development.” It’s a half-truth. Our kids are all called “brilliant” now. Really? From where they learned their skills EVERYONE was expected to perform the same. No one in this state, public or private, is working at the level of our kids’ AFrican classmates who spoke 1) mother tongue 2) French or English 3) German 4) plus Latin. I am not making this up. Only the native Spanish speakers notice our kids speak SPanish with a French accent. They walked in half way thru cold and passed the exams to get into Spanish, never spoke a word of it it before and got a C on the mid-term exams, an A+ for the final.
Solid SKILLS make performance. Our schools say the kids aren’t capable, distracting from the FAIL of any credible skills-delivery by the adults who run the schools.
The public school guidance counselor this week reduced the foreign exchange student to tears, TEARS when she discovered he’d ignored two months of requests to get her school transcripts in simple format line with the Hague Conventions so she could get school credit for this year. He did absolutely nothing, but drives a LEXUS. Nice work if you can get it.
We put 6 kids thru 15 American public and private schools in 4 states, PLUS 5 different countries through the French public school system. WE know EXACTLY where the American system FAILS in EVERY subject, at every grade, through the so-called teaching and over-priced bells and whistles school buy for textbooks. We had enough of AMerican teachers who showed cartoon videos all day and sent hours of homework home – dumping the tasks of actual instruction on parents.
We have more field data and first hand experience on this than most Americans, bar none. It’s a national disaster and Arizona is even worse, duking it out for last place with states like New Mexico. We are not impressed with any talk of “poor” and “disadvantaged” as excuses for non-performance as all our foreign country living was in Third World nations. Poor people in those countries routinely speak at least two languages, but here? It’s typical talk about “Americans need Spanish” yet the local public school employs a teacher who can’t even speak the language. We can count on ONE HAND the foriegn language teachers we’ve dealt with through all those schools in te USA who actually have ANY comeptency in it, and they are supposed to be teaching it. Math is no different, and the effects of lousy math on overall academic acheivement are worse than being short a foreign language. Great work if ya can get it. No other sector can afford to hire staff who have no backgrounds in what they are supposed to being doing. The schools have different priorities than actually delivering useful skills to students. Then, people sit around and bemoan how worthless our students are. Really? WHO had them for 12 years and didn’t prepare them?
Foreign schools routinely teach cursive handwriting by 1st grade, a tidy adult-size script by age 7 while our “educators” first argued it was unfair to press children to learn early writing skills, teaching big fat babyish printing useless for more common writing tasks, and NOW are arguing they don’t need to teach any writing skills at all becuase “everything is on computers.” By second grade, our kids are already BEHIND second graders world wide. They don’t have to be, our schools are holding them back, dumbing down what they need.
It is virtually impossible now for any American student to transfer in at any grade to a foreign school and succeed. They don’t have the necessary skills because our schools don’t teach them.
“Poverty” is an excuse to cover education stablishment non-performance, failed experimental curriculum and “facilitating” instead of teaching. American students had a better education in readin’ ritin’ rithmetic during the Great Depression than they do now. No computers, either.
wanumba,
Just about everything you said is incorrect. Data is available, and long term studies have been going on for a long time.
What we know is that reading, math and science scores did go down in the 70’s, but by the late 80’s and mid 90’s we were achieving as well as we did before the drop in the 70’s. Long term data trends are summarized here: http://nces.ed.gov/pressrelease/reform/pdf/reform.pdf Mr. Safier’s thesis is correct. We started keeping everybody in school, and as a result of the larger test samples, the average scores went down. It’s not like education fell apart and students stopped learning. No. If we just test the kids in University High and in Sabinlo High, our scores are going to look great; if you enlarge the sample to include all high schools in Tucson, the average scores go way down. That’s the basic dynamic from 1969 through 1996. We kept the drop outs in school and the average scores went down.
So the question now is, what have we done lately? Many analysts posit incorrect conclusions from the international Science and Math tests (TIMMS) that have happened four times since 1995. Looking at the averages is meaningless, because sample size is different in different countries. We test a lot of different kids in some of the tests (84%) and some other countries have very small sample sizes (53%). SO the average score is totally meaningless. What’s better is examining the number of high achievers and the number of low achievers in each country and look at the comparisons there. When you do, you’ll discover America has a HUGE percentage of high achievers. For example, in 4th grade Science, America has 13% scoring in the “advanced” level, while the average is 7%; in 8th grade we have 11% scoring “advanced” while the average is 6%. Considering we test a LOT more students than anybody else, the fact that we have higher percentages of students scoring as “advanced” than other countries means we know how to educate kids and we know how to do it very well.
The problem is in the high number of of students scoring as “low performing,” ranging from 22% to 36%. Only Italy has a higher percentage of low performing students. It is this very large number of low performers that bring down our average ranking. (You think Singapore is including their poor farming kids from the country in their test sample? You think the Danish are including their poor kids — wait, there are no poor kids in Denmark. They have a great social safety net and do not have kids living in desperate states of poverty like we do in the United States. What’s our childhood poverty rate in the U.S.? 22%? This is one reason why comparing “averages” is too problematic to draw useful and accurate conclusions.)
So we do have a problem, but not the one you claim. You say our successful high school students are the equivalent to a European high school drop out. Not true. There is a reason that 460,000 students a year graduate from our prestigious universities each year (M.I.T., Georgia Tech, Cal Berkley, etc) with degrees in Science and Engineering. We educate a lot of people very well, more than any other country. The problem is we have a HUGE segment of the population living in poverty (e.g., East St. Louis, East Los Angelos, Washington D.C.) that score low on international tests and have a hard time in school. Correction: they have a hard time in life.
SO the only fair and accurate conclusion is we do not have a problem with education in America. We know how to do it very well, as evidenced by the fact that we have more people than any other country scoring as “advanced.” NO, we have a problem with poverty in America, and we are having a significant problem figuring out how to educate the kids living in poverty. One solution that various groups and charters has discovered is if you remove a child from poverty, he or she will perform better in school. Take the poor kid out of the poor neighborhood and he or she starts doing much better in school.
End poverty and you have more kids performing better in school. We don’t have problem with education in America. We have a problem with poverty in America. Period.
Well that’s one suggestion. Solutions, however, require correctly identifying the problem. How about the reality of expensive but sub-par curriculum and self-teaching introduced in AZ in 1966? AZ abandoned traditional skills-oriented schooling, took the “progressive” route and in one fell swoop plucked teaching and academics out of schools. AZ has never restored traditional academics at the levels that were the norm fifty years ago, for everyone.
Our students are today graduating with simplified, boring, low-level academics literally years behind their European and Asian counterparts who have teachers who know their subjects and are taught a solid, organized and logical curriculum, curriculum that is world-compettive and cheaper than what our schools purchase. The dishonesty that currently pervades the so-called education profession is a travesty.
How bad is it? Our successful high school graduates are of the academic level of a European drop-out, our drop-outs are by all measurements, uneducated, after years of being in classrooms.
WHo knew? Their report cards looked fine, but “teachers” actually coached them thru exams, but they cannot independently function at the levels they need to for college or trade schools.
“Poor” is a poor excuse for what’s been going on.
Excellent points. At the same time this push started, the move away from the ‘trade school’ track began as well. So kids who might have had good skills and a career path in auto shop, plumbing, electrical, secretarial or drafting back in the day are now the kids who don’t/can’t pass AIMS and eventually drop out or don’t graduate with any salable skills.