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| Hello.
I regret to inform you all that as of this morning, I have created another blog. This page will become dormant after years of posting, or not reallly postinig at all.
My new blog is at: www.mudasman.blogspot.com
Check it out, I'll being updating it frequently. Or at least I'm saying that now.
Thanks to all you who have read my posts.
Steve | | |
| According to a recent issue of Time magazine, an increasing number of researchers are saying that nearly 1 out of 3 public high school students won’t graduate. For Latinos and African Americans, the rate approaches an alarming 50%. These surprisingly high numbers span across our nation, regardless of a school’s size and location, and though Time recognizes a “small but hardy” band of researches who claim the numbers are slightly lower, most agree that nearly a third of our youth will never see graduation day.
This debate over dropout percentage is “hard to referee in the wake of decades of lax accounting by states or schools,” says Time. Many have been deceptive in calculating the number of high school dropouts. Most school districts do not count any dropouts who promise to take the GED eventually, as well as any who joins the military. The U.S. Census does not include transients or prisoners, populations with high proportions of dropouts, thus too underestimating this growing epidemic.
After studying raw education data, Jay Greene, from the Manhattan Institute, published a study stating that only 64-71 percent of students who start high school actually finish regardless of post dropout actions. It’s a rate that most researchers say has remained constant since the 1970s despite increased educational-reform efforts.
Many would suggest that the number has remained constant because students who drop out are necessary for society to function the way that it does. They would suggest that we need dropouts to fill the low-wage and blue-collar jobs that educated citizens wouldn’t want. However, with the increase of illegal immigrants to America working for less than minimum wage, along with the increase of outsourcing and globalization of the past 10 years, these rates should have surely fluxed slightly. There is more going on that is keeping dropout rates so high.
The government has issued a number of dropout prevention, the most recent being the No Child Left Behind Act imposed by President Bush in 2002 meant to rally around the notion that every child should be prepared for higher education. The legislation issued uniform curriculum and standardized testing, as well as held each individual public school responsible for their dropout rates, penalizing increasing numbers and rewarding high testing.
The idea is one of incentives. If students are threatened with high-stakes testing, they will study harder, right? If teachers are paid according to how well their students do, they will work harder and closer with the students to educate the class accordingly, wouldn’t they? Besides, if the test prevents poor students from advancing without merit, they won’t clog up the higher grades and slow down good students. The truth is, this all-or-nothing mentality looks good on paper, but is one of the larger reasons that dropout rates remain so high.
One of the problems with high-stake testing lies in the notion that every child should be prepared for higher education. Sounds good, until we remember that the government just cut $50 billion dollars in spending last December targeting low-income families and student loans. For a student who know that this “higher education” is either financially impossible or simply not the life avenue he or she may want to take, public education means very little. A recent National Center for Education Statistics study says that kids from the lowest income quarter are more than six times likely to drop out of high school as kids from the highest.
Teachers are increasingly “teaching to the test,” conditioning their students for college, much like a kindergarten class is conditioned to integrate smoothly into a classroom environment. High school has become not a place of education for the sake of learning, but a place of education for the sake of getting to the next level. For students who see through this, or do not have the interest or privilege of climbing the latters of society, a high school education has become irrelevant. For those who are poor test-testers, it is an impractical incentive.
John Bridgeland, CEO of Washington-based public-policy firm Civic Enterprises, co-wrote a Gates Foundation-funded report saying that 88% of dropouts said they had passing grades in high school. This furthers the notion that it is not laziness that drives students from the classroom, but boredom.
But there is still more going on. The 2002 legislation supports a merit-based incentive for school to increase test scores. Instead of motivating students and faculty to work harder, it seems that the effect is just the opposite, producing “pushouts” or increasing grade inflation, even faculty cheating.
This problem has been around even before the it was made a federal law. Before 2002, 20 states rewarded individual schools for good test schools for good test scores or dramatic improvements, 32 states sanctioned the schools that didn’t do well.
With high-stakes testing, a teacher whose students test poorly can be censured or passed over for a raise or promotion, even fired. If the entire school does poorly, federal funding can be withheld. It includes some positive incentives as well. According to economist Steven Levitt’s recent book Freakonomics, the state of California at one point introduced bonuses of $25,000 for teachers who produced big test-score gains. All glory and riches to those who can perform.
But what happens when a student falls behind, or shows signs of educational apathy? Surely a teacher will take the time to teach those who need the most help, right? Again, incentives rule. It is more likely that the “gifted” students will be the ones who will get more attention, they are remember the ones who will make schools and teachers look better. Those who need the most help are too often left in the dust and encouraged, however silently, to excuse themselves from education. How hard will a school or teacher fight for one student when their job or state funding is on the line?
If not pushed out, the struggling student continues to struggle in the shadows, increasing the chances that he or she will throw in the towel.
In 1968, sociologists Rosenthal and Jacobson did an experiment to test the effect teachers have on their students. They labeled a random sample of students “bloomers," separating them from the rest of the average class. Rosenthal and Jacobson wanted to see how children being labeled as dull or bright would contribute to how teachers would react to them, and if that in turn would effect how much they learned. The results showed that the random sample of students label “bloomers” averaged 12.2 points of improvement in their intellectual growth, while the normal students averaged 8.2 points of intellectual growth. The study further supports the idea that a teacher’s predeterminations about a student can make learning more difficult, and thus dropout more common.
The labels given to a student, whether "gifted” or “slow”, can also cause division among the student body. A struggling student can be ostracized from the ‘better’ ones, not only in the classroom, but in the lunchroom, halls and lockers. A student’s social ties to a school can also influence the decision to dropout. If separated from a group, an individual may me more inclined to feel incapable of fitting in, of keeping up.
But the other side is just as dangerous. Grade inflation is another result of merit-based rewards. Many teachers will give higher grades; curve tests; even, though in small percentages, outright erase and fill in correct answers on their student’s test. According to Freakonomics, there was a study conducted among North Carolina schoolteachers, the results showed some 35 percent of the respondents said that they had “witnessed their colleagues cheating in some fashion, whether by giving students extra time, suggesting answers, or manually changing students’ answers.” In the case of answer changing alone, an analysis of Chicago Public School data from 1993 to 2000 revealed evidence of teacher cheating in more than two hundred classrooms per year, roughly 5 percent of the total.
The problem is that this allows students to slide through early education with the notion that they are a better student than they actually are. It is not their fault that their grades or scores were artificially jacked up. All they knew was that they had been successfully promoted to the next level due to their test scores. They probably expect to do great things in high school, but what happens when suddenly they reach the ninth or tenth grade and realize that they’ve missed a whole year of education? A cheating teacher may be convinced he or she is helping the students, but it all comes down to incentives –assisting his or herself.
It is so easy to shake one’s head at statistics and rule them off as evidence of a failing generation. I’ll be the first ones to admit that my generation is in desperate need of some work ethics. However, the greater challenge is to dig deeper, to attempt an understanding of why our society acts the way it does. There may be many other reasons for the continual rate of high school dropouts, but one thing is certain: our current attempts to combat this problem are not working, in fact, they are causing more problems.
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|  This is my roommate.  He's a hypochondriac.  He embraces it. | | |
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