ParisTampaBlog

Republican law makers in Colorado still don’t get it. Somehow they still think education will follow from their setting education requirements. I didn’t see them make this proposal, but I don’t think they were laughing when they did so. I’m pretty sure they didn’t consider their proposal a cruel joke (it was).

The lawmakers probably actually believed that by legislating statewide high school graduation requirements of four years of English and Math, three years of Science and Social Studies, and two years of a second language, that kids would learn these subject matters, if for no other reason than in order to graduate. Oh that it were that easy (it’s not). And they won’t.

How would the assessment of whether of not English, Math, Science, Social Studies and the foreign language had been learned be made? Easy according to the law makers, by a proficiency exam, or by multiple proficiency exams, as I suppose they meant, measuring student achievement.

Haven’t the lawmakers been reading the endless numbers of words written about proficiency and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001? Proficiency exams, unless the proficiency bar is set at the skill and knowledge level of the weakest among those taking the exam, will always have outcomes with a normal Bell curve distribution, that is one half above and one half below the average.

That’s one serious weakness in their proposal—what they propose is just not possible. But there’s another perhaps even greater weakness. The math, English, Social Studies, Science, and foreign language curriculum (actually this has been standard fare at the American high school for generations… it was my fare when I attended public high school in the forties) is a college preparatory curriculum. And so far no one has shown us that all kids are able to do college level work, let alone even want to do that work. (At least if they wanted it then they might have a chance. Most don’t, and if forced to go along will eventually drop out, if not in high school in college, probably in the first year.)

The Colorado lawmakers are not at all alone in being fooled. Probably most educators are fooled into believing that college should be for everyone. And if they didn’t believe that they would be hard put to defend their position to all those parents, probably the majority, who want and fully expect their son or daughter to attend college.

The result is that the kids are really on their own. Very few of the adults in their lives understand that they want something other than four years of Math etc. Parents and educators want one thing and they want something else. Most of them will rebel, most of these by not doing the work, a good number by dropping out of school, and a select few by doing their own thing, for which this country is grateful, such as  founding a Microsoft, Apple, or Google Inc.

This entry was posted on October 17, 2007 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Education. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.