Someone must be blamed, but whom?
Whose fault is it if high school pupils are not fully prepared for college when they get a diploma? Is it students, the school districts or the state? We’ll discount personal responsibility, even though education is quite personal, and those who want it badly enough always get an extra helping, and they succeed.
Those successful students seem the exception not the rule in the Garden State, and that has educators sweating. There is snarling everywhere because of grads who need remedial help in college, grads who can’t give change for $1 if the bill is 89 cents, and others who can’t understand why a credit card with a 27 percent annual percentage interest rate is a bad thing.
One would have thought that by May 2008, after teaching reading, writing and mathematics for, oh, let’s say 175 years; this state would have had education down pat, letter perfect. It is not.
I shivered as I read some of the proposals contained in the NJ STEPS: Redesigning Education In New Jersey for the 21st Century.
A glitch surfaced in many a state college, and that embarrassing fact was that many Jersey high school grads need remedial help when they are in freshmen year in college.
The answer to this dilemma, of course, is to make high school courses more rigorous. Force Algebra I, Algebra II and Geometry, biology and chemistry down students’ throats, and toss in a half-year of economics for good measure along with current state standards to earn a high school diploma. Is it possible that expecting ever-higher standards from students could have the ultimate effect of discouraging them from trying?
Nobody wants to fail, but after trying so many times, won’t an average student just quit trying? I realize we must expect nothing less than perfection from our teens; still there is a limit.
Those subjects that may get a new “full-court press” made me shudder as a 15-year-old, and today still make me shudder. The answer to the young ruler who wanted an easy way out from mathematics sticks in my brain, “There is no royal road to mathematics.”
Could it be that those three much-feared, much-maligned math-related subjects are easier for today’s teens to understand than they were in the late 1960s? Is the iPod generation more tolerant of 7x + 34y = 276 than I was?
If I admit I don’t understand algebra or geometry after 41 years, will state Education Commissioner Lucille Davy order County Executive Superintendent Terrence Crowley to revoke my high school diploma? Will I be ordered to summer school until I grasp negative numbers and symbol-filled problems?
My heart goes out to today’s high school students. They are expected to be up to snuff on things like DNA and atomic theory, free ions and chemistry and underlying causes for the 100 Years War, all that while trying to hustle a date for Saturday night, and understand why it’s important to follow the presidential campaign.
Never a shining star in chemistry, during an experiment to prove the Solvay process, I blew up a glass flask and made the lab smell of heated clamshells.
I really think the school administration faced reality, thought I was a nice kid, and granted me a diploma to make a seat available for someone else, and let the Navy handle this hopeless case.
Could I pass today’s High School Proficiency Test, as all pupils must to earn a diploma? Perhaps if it were “multiple guess” I could, but I wouldn’t bet a retirement check on it.
The state will likely tweak the education system once again, hoping to turn out legions of “world-class” scholars who can start college classes without needing remedial courses.
How will teachers attack the massive problem of getting that Greek-like information into 21st Century brains that may not be ready (or willing) to accept it?
Conversely, how will students accept the stiffer challenges placed before them? Will they soak up algebra and chemistry like dry sponges, or will they rebel (as teens are so capable of doing)?
Before the two-year study was undertaken, which involved over 1,000 educators, members of the public and “education stakeholders,” did it not occur to anyone — ANYONE — grassroots to commissioner of education, that someone should have been coordinating courses to ensure what was being paid for by tax money was being realized?
Did not one person call a halt to a math program because it was teaching youngsters, but not the information that they would sorely need once they got out of school?
Was there not one professor in all of New Jersey’s academia who, disgusted with the caliber of fresh-faced freshmen who could neither read capably nor write a cogent sentence, went to the Department of Education and said, “You should be teaching English (or math) this way starting in first grade?”
The report recognized that teaching more to make smarter kids comes at a time when budgets are “constrained” nearly to the breaking point at state and local levels. Taxpayers are seething, some at the breaking point, and don’t want to hear more about added education costs. They just want results.
“It is expected that additional resources for these recommendations must be found through strategic reallocations,” according to a release from Gov. Corzine’s office.
Where will those “strategic reallocations” originate? What will be cut so that new initiatives get funded? Who will have the knife in their hands to do this dirty work?
Who can we blame for this mess?
Cape May – Governor Murphy says he doesn't know anything about the drones and doesn't know what they are doing but he does know that they are not dangerous. Does anyone feel better now?
