On the High School Movement

I don't often cite Wikipedia as a source, but it has a highly useful article on the high school movement that enabled me to connect various strands in international educational history. I have often read that the United States once was a world leader in educational attainment, and the data bear this out. In my grandparents' era (1910), only around 10% of all students graduated from high school. The "high school movement" very successfully changed this, so that high schools were rapidly built all over this country and in just one generation, by the mid-20th century, we were approaching 80% in high school completion, and led the world in educational attainment. To show just how radical and successful this was, some comparisons are in order. In Italy, students take a state examination, the licenza media, at the end of eighth grade to this day, since eighth grade, age 14, was ordinary school leaving age when Italy was setting up its national schooling system after World War II. In France the equivalent exam is the Diplome National du Brevet, taken at 15, after ninth grade. The United Kingdom was a bit more ambitious: there students take the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams at age 16, and because they (wisely, in my view) start school at age five, this means 11 years of schooling for children in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But the U.S. was best of all: although without state graduation exams, we got the majority of our population through high school, educated through age 18, and so had the most highly educated workforce in the world ready to fuel our post-war boom.

But that was then, and this is now. Other countries have made enormous strides in educational attainment in the last six decades, while the twin heralds of secondary education in the United States, the echoes of the high school movement and the College Board, remain stuck in the 20th century, promoting the weak credential we call the high school diploma, which no longer signals that a student is ready for either college or a career. We ballyhoo new movements and schools stuck with 20th century goals, and increasingly produce graduates with meaningless certificates who, when stopped a year after their high school graduation and asked what they are currently doing, too often reply, "Nothing." They may be floundering through some community college remedial courses, or struggling to compete for low wage entry jobs serving food to their more competitively educated elders, or both, but by no means have they been prepared for life in the 20th century.

We need a dual system, like those found in Europe in all countries between Switzerland and Norway. We need to change the conjunction in that familiar phrase "ready for college and career" to an or, so that our young people can either start their careers with good work at a good wage because of their highly trained skills or are prepared to earn bachelors' degrees in three years because they will have already finished their general education in genuinely new model upper secondary schools.

The Older the Students, the More School Choices are Needed

Today I've run across yet another disturbing report, this time on the PBS News Hour, on the costs our society incurs when students drop out of school. While the ultimate cause of declining prospects for dropouts is overpopulation in the Third World, our best response has to be to increase the number of schooling options available to secondary school students.

Opponents of school choice usually argue in favor of equity, and advocate making our existing local schools better, since opening up competing alternatives will likely leave some (most often those children unfortunately stuck with ignorant and careless parents, if the parents are still around at all) with the inferior, leftover options, since the better choices will likely already have been taken up by those families that are more educationally ambitious and better informed. I can imagine conceding that point, and recent evidence about the new school choice options in Indiana, which has the nation's most generous school voucher law, which I applaud, is showing that some of the private school beneficiaries there are taking advantage of their new opportunities to leave the neediest students behind in the traditional public schools, which become the repositories of all those kids who aren't getting chosen because they aren't the most attractive, from the private schools' points of view.

So how about this: leave our primary schools, through sixth grade, as local monopolies, as they do in Finland and Singapore, two often-praised school systems with very different approaches in other ways, thereby providing an equal opportunity to all children (and we have an enormous amount of work to do to raise the level of our many poorly performing schools so that all children will have an equal opportunity to get off to a good start in school); then allow chartered alternatives to become established from middle school onward, since it's obvious that not all students are succeeding in even our best model local primary schools and middle schools, and some can benefit from alternative provision, a point the defenders of traditional school districts will likely concede; and finally, in upper secondary, allow strictly college preparatory and strictly vocational schools to exist and receive taxpayer funding through vouchers, in addition to our traditional provision of comprehensive high schools? The establishment of a viable vocational sector is particularly important for us, since those countries that have a vocational sector that successfully competes for middle school graduates, meaning virtually all (mostly Germanic) European countries from Switzerland northward to Norway, have much lower youth unemployment rates than those in the English-speaking world whose educational systems traditionally treat work like four-letter word, to be avoided and delayed for as long as possible.

Let's stop begging students to stay in schools they hate, and instead provide them with some alternatives they may like a lot better.

Our Achievement Gap Stems, in Part, From Our Fixation on the Achievement Gap

I just today read an excellent article in The Washington Post on Kosen, Japan's special polytechnical schools that accept students as early as 15, give them five years of vocationally oriented technical training during what would  be our high school and junior college years, and then watch them leave with an average of 20 job offers per new graduate; if they stay an extra two years and earn a diploma roughly equivalent to a master's degree, the ratio goes up to 30 job offers per graduate.

I also read today that the percentage of young Americans aged 20 to 24 who are employed has shrunk from 74 percent in 2000 to just 62 percent now, the lowest since the 1930s.

Our obsession with having our young people correctly fill in bubble sheets is severely underserving our youth. Some of them, like my own children, do pretty well on such tests, and generally still turn out all right; others, like the many I taught at Locke High School in Watts, have almost no good options available to them; and well-meaning educational leaders who moved to end (rather than modernize) their vocational programs because "each and every student is expected to go to college" have unwittingly promoted a disaster.