One of the silliest statements I have read in a long time regarding education (excluding anything involving Colorado nut case Ward Churchill) surfaced regarding a discussion of why certain school districts fail to offer sufficient college prepatory courses to high school students.

As reported in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, a director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education stated in so many words that cramming more academics into student’s schedules was a bad idea because those kids who aren’t interested in academics might be more inclined to drop out.

There are so many problems with this line of thinking that it’s hard to know where to start. Worse, at the foundation of this thinking is a number of common misconceptions that lead to ongoing bad educational policy.

First, it separates adacemics from education. This is as spooky as it is kooky. High schools are not giant day care centers. They are prepatory for later life whether that is college, junior college, or a technical trade. In today’s increasingly competitive world, a lack of fundamental understanding of math, English, and similar skills will hold people back from better paying jobs in the future (even blue color jobs).

Second, it mirrors a general trend we have in society. We solve the problem of kids failing tests by making the tests easier and not by teaching them more. We fight standardized tests on the grounds that they are biased against the kids (or schools) who don’t do so well. We stop scoring in games to protect those who don’t score as much. We give everyone trophies or no one trophies. By making sure that we have no losers, we also insure that we have no winners.

Together this thinking creates an aversion to challenge kids to do better in school when in fact studies have shown that students perform better academically when placed in more challenging courses (reference UCLA educational professor Jeannie Oakes). Even worse, this aversion leads high schools reducing the number of college prepatory classes in favor of non-academic areas that are presumably easier and more fun, which they probably are. But the world is a changing place and if little Johnny wants to keep his job from moving to Banalore it will be help if he is at least as educated as students graduating from Bangalore High who you can bet are getting their fill of geometry, chemistry, and English.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 at 7:26 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.