A Two-Tiered Graduation System?
May 7, 2008
The Columbus Dispatch has a very interesting article to those of us that care about education in Ohio regarding the new Ohio CORE Curriculum. According to an administrator of Columbus City Schools (formerly Columbus Public):
Columbus schools will have to hire more math teachers, modernize their science labs and increase the number of counselors to prepare students for the state’s new graduation requirements, a district administrator told the school board last night.
As a both a secondary and post-secondary educator, I am familiar with the new Core requirements. What I did not know before reading this article was that three state colleges will be exempted from requiring these Core standards for matriculation purposes. They include Central State, Youngstown State and Shawnee State.
I find this quite interesting that students that could not meet the general requirements to attend a state university might have a chance to attend one of these three schools and earn a college degree. Will these three schools now be considered the “dummy schools” in Ohio?
When do we stop fooling ourselves that college is for every student? It certainly is not and we shouldn’t be setting at-risk kids up for failure.
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I was at a community meeting the other night, one that was set up by Rep. Ted Celeste. I don’t live in his district, but he said it was to be a town meeting about education, and since it was right here in Hilliard, I went.
At some point someone said that the US economy could not compete globally unless ALL of our kids get a good education, and that apparently includes having every kid pass Algebra 2 according to our state leaders.
I drew some glowers when I said that the US wasn’t losing jobs to China because Chinese workers are smarter, it’s because they work cheaper! We have no shortage of smart people in the this country, we’ve just priced ourselves out of the labor market.
Here’s a data point - while we complain about the price of gas, the key component my business uses in our product has DECREASED in price from $390 four years ago to $85 today. Why? Because like most electronic devices these days, it is now assembled in China - no doubt by former farm peasants who are probably barely literate.
It would be one thing if we were like Finland or Norway and constrained immigration. Their population pyramids have virtually straight sides. Indeed some European countries have negative population growth.
The US really has three pyramids: One is for American families who have been here for generations, and that pyramid looks like one for a European country - little growth (because birth rates match death rates). Another is for families in which the immigrant generation is still alive - and it looks more like one of a third-world country (lots of kids).
The third is for poverty-class, slave-descendant African-Americans. In that population, the fertility rate is high like a developing country, and the infant mortality rate is nothing for America to be proud about. But the real problem is that African-American males have a very high probability of being incarcerated at some point in their young years. Surviving those years is a real challenge. A friend of mine who works is essentially a missionary in South Linden told me the other day that the first set of teenage Black males he worked with a decade ago are all now dead.
Why is that? I won’t pretent to be an expert on the cultural issues, but from an economic standpoint, it’s that dealing drugs is the best career choice available. And it’s not because those youth haven’t taken Algebra 2, it’s because the kinds of work that could employ them with a basic high school education have been exported. Like the ones of building my electronic components.
I am fundamentally a free-market kind of person. But I still think our government has a role as the macro negotiator for our country in matters of international business. Trade agreements need to simultaneously protect our industries from radical change while inducing them to change radlcally. The best defense is a good offense kind of thing.
We’re letting education suck of more and more of the resources of our economy, and I fear that the effect is to only slightly raise the results of the worst students while denying opportunities to the best.
And the more deeply I have become involved in school economics, the more I understand the role of teachers’ unions in the policymaking. It’s not so much about the kids as it is the teachers’ compensation package. This ugly truth has surfaced in Hilliard this year.
We have politicized all the common sense out of our policymaking. I suppose that’s what the end of an empire looks like.
PL