High School a relic?

[Dr Mordrid]

North Carolina leading the way to "Early Colleges"....

Will High Schools Be A Relic Of The Past?

North Carolina's 'Early Colleges' Combine High School And College Classes To Get Dropout Rate Down

(CBS) We're often told that problems aren't always as big as they seem, and that a little creativity may bring a solution.

So when North Carolina's governor confronted his big problem — one of the worst high school dropout rates in the country — his creativity kicked into overdrive, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reports.

"One way to get the high school dropout rate down is to do away with high school," says Gov. Michael Easley.

Sound far-fetched? The Legislature didn't think so.

"When I put this in the budget for the first time, I thought there'd be a big fight over it. And everybody said 'this is a great idea, let's do it,'" the governor says.

North Carolina didn't actually eliminate high schools. It just put some of them on steroids. They're called "Early Colleges" — high schools located on college campuses where students can take high school history and college-level English on the same day. Before they know it, student not only get a high school diploma, but a two-year associate's degree — all by the time they're 18.

It's a jumpstart that saves time and resources, and here's the kicker: It's all free.

Student Chad Lewis says it's "not a bad deal at all."

Lewis wanted to work on big rig trucks, but said high school bored him. Now he can study history and hydraulics at the same time — and he already has a job.

"It really gives you a reason for getting up in the morning, something you want to do, something that you felt that a lot of people supported you through, that you really want to go do," Lewis explains.
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To be honest; it sounds like our high school in the 60's but we didn't get AD's with our diploma. Our teachers were very up on their subjects and we had a very active VocEd program.

What really needs to be done is to cut the politically correct classes, get rid of the illiterate/incompetent teachers and bring back vocational education in a big way.

Unfortunately a lot of todays districts have let VocEd slip and have teachers who are not majors, or even minors, in their subjects. Ever have a math class taught by a PhysEd teacher?

Then there's the issue if teachers can even read. Teachers in one major city were required to take a competency test after the law was changed to require them; >60% of the teachers failed the reading section, 46% failed the math section and 26% failed the writing section.

Not good and things haven't got much better folks

Welcome to why a HS diploma isn't worth squat anymore.

[Jammrock]

We currently live about 12 miles from the NC border in SC. When my wife heard this announcement her immediate response was, "We're moving to NC before the kids start High School." Anyway, the Charlotte area schools have lots of cool programs. There are emmersion schools, where the kids only speak a foriegn language during school hours such as French, German, Japanese, Spanish and now Chinese. Plus they have AP and ... that other AP like program that I can't remember (IB or something like that). Anyway, Charlotte usually places 2-3 high schools in the top 100 every years, and an additional 1-2 in the top 250, which is almost half of the high schools in the county.

Honestly, what schools really need is to get ride of the unions. While the unions have performed valuable services in the past, now all they do is drain district resources and cause more problems than they solve Though I'm sure you will probably think likewise, Doc. The SC govenor wanted to overhaul education and make it more like Belgium and other high ranking western European schools, but the union organized and got his proposal shot down saying they were doing a good job. SC is ranked 46th out of 51 (includes DC) for schools, meaning only 4 states and DC have worse schools than SC. Not really doing a good job now are they?

Down with the unions! Up with reorganized school structures!

Jammrock

[Dr Mordrid]

Agreed. So does Margie and she's a teacher

All the teachers unions do here is muck up common sense reforms, even those that would actually benefit teachers in the long run like getting rid of the bad ones.

Know what else? You don't have to be a teacher to be a principal or school administrator anymore, all you need is the educational equivalent of an MBA. Yup; you have people supervising teachers, making/enforcing school policies and putting together curriculum's that have never taught a class. On top of that most don't have kids, so their knowledge is almost all theoretical.

Go figure

Basically they've done to education what the UAW did to Ford, Chrysler and GM...though a big dose of complacency on managements part didn't help any.

[the main lobe]

I am a first year high school teacher, currently teaching classes as part of our school districts Vocational Tech/Pre-engineering program. Prior to beginning my teaching career, I was lecturing as a TA in the Electrical Engineering Dept. at Northern Illinois University. When I realized that many of the college students seemed incapable of working out any problem that required genuine thought, I spent a significant amount of time wondering why. Because I enjoyed teaching at the University, I decided to pick up the certification to teach Mathematics.

Last May I interviewed for a position to teach courses in our Pre-engineering program. It seems that I teach very few interested kids. I have a single "engineering" course. This course is a digital electronics class. The curriculum has been developed by Project Lead the Way. www.pltw.org The curriculum is not bad, but it seems that it was developed knowing that the classroom instructor would not be by any definition an expert in the field. In other words the curriculum is written to act as an instruction manual. I supplement the material heavily, and the result is a pretty decent course. It would be a better course if we could limit the enrollment to kids with a B or better in Algebra 2, but it seems important to the administration that enrollment numbers are high. As this year is the first time the course has been offered, my current class size is 12.

The other courses I teach are introductory electronics and CAD courses. As I look at the kids taking these courses, I am nearly always disappointed with our current educational system. Most of these kids have become genuine idiots. I should have expected as much, after all I have been in a WalMart. The kids are a mixed bag, some are content on being idiots while others think they are going to strike it rich playing football. Some tell me that their parents did poorly in school and they turned out just fine. I have insisted that the changing global economy coupled with the growing gap in productivity between highly skilled and less skilled workers will make it unlikely that they will do well if they are not highly skilled. The response I typically get is "That Sucks," and thirty seconds later I notice that half the class has thrown the criteria/rubrics for their projects onto the floor and they are firing up the Java games or YouTube.

Allowing the students to fail seems appropriate, but it is not easily done. Many of the kids do fail the courses I teach. From my understanding many more than usual, but many of the lazy and usually incompetent squeek by with C's and D's because the ultra low performers manage to do so poorly and take so much class time.

No Child Left Behind places the money and therefore administrator focus on the slowest kids, and as a result teachers are filling out paperwork and communicating with Resource Teachers more than they are focusing on the kids that want to be in school.

There is no fix to the problems of our educational system, but seperating out the kids that can perform and tossing them back if they don't is a good move. I feel bad when there is a bright and determined kid sitting in class surrounded by idiots and jerks. I offer challenging problems, but the environment chips away at the kid's determination.

I often do question if High School is necessary. If it is, the necessity is probably more social than academic. Good kids will find a way to succeed in any environment even if the environment is not what society world currently deem "developmentally appropriate." Kids that do not have academic interests tend should be learning a trade, and they should not be forced to learn in an environment saturatd by the school's problem students and Special Ed. students.

I know there will be a few students (just a few) that will be disappointed that I do not come back next year, but working very hard for the benefit of kids that really do not seem to care is not how I want to spend my life. I have heard that teachers are not made, but are instead born. If this is the case and I was born to be a teacher, I was almost certainly born to also wind up in prison or a nut house.

I have met several good and very bright teachers. Many are disliked by colleagues because it shines a light on the performance of others. Administrators like happy and obediant workers, so the wrong guys stick around and teach our kids. Then again, I don't have to tell any of you any of this. You see the results every day, and see the same politics in your own workplaces.

Sorry for the long rant, but sometimes it feels good to ramble on while trying to organize thoughts and frustrations accumulated over the past few months.

[Dr Mordrid]

I hear a similar rant every day as I drive Margie home from school. I could wear ear plugs and still nod & grin in all the right places

[DGhost]

Personally, I think I would have been better off in a program like that. Seriously. I was bored off my ass in High School (dropped out and got a GED instead), and college was a slap in the face after taking Honors/AP courses most of the way though HS. Being able to roll it all together probably would have actually been a better thing. I might have stuck around :/

But.. yeah. Our ed system is seriously ****ed up. Something has to change.

[Brian Ellis]

There is always some problem, if you replace the system by another. I'll recount my own experience, not to boast but to simply recount the facts. In Scotland, in the 1940s, you went through school on your merits, not according to age. By the time I sat the exams for university entrance, the age ranged from 15 to 21 in the one class (I was 15 and I think there was only one other of about the same age as myself). This continued into university and I obtained my degree at 18, but some of my colleagues were in the comparatively late 20s, exacerbated that some were demobilised from the forces after 1945, having interrupted their education to fight the war. This meant that we, in a class, were all scholastically at much the same level so the curriculum was much more concentrated and wide in scope than would have been the case had we all been the same age but of a wide range of intellectual prowess.

Furthermore, in school, we were divided into streams with separate classes for each stream. My stream was Science and the subject I had to take for the Scottish Senior Leaving Certificate Higher Level were:
Arithmetic
Maths (algebra, Euclidean geometry, trig, logs, differential calculus)
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
English grammar
English literature
French grammar
French literature
Geography
(I had dropped History, Latin, Greek and Russian two years beforehand). In order to get the "Highers" cert, you had to pass every exam in the chosen group in the same year, meaning you had to repeat the whole year in all subjects if you failed (or drop out).

This worked fine, except for two things. As the youngest and most physically immature in the class, I was always amongst the worst in the gym or on the playing field (rugby and cricket) and thus was often left out through lack of coordination, compared to my elder peers. This was resolved in University, as physical activities were not mandatory. However, I was still the precocious kid, youngest in the class, and this did create a kinda sorta inferiority complex which possibly lasts, to some extent, to this day. The role models in school (e.g. prefects) were always those who excelled in games and were comparatively mediocre academically. This psychological aspect is the downside to meritricious advancement in school, as against the downside of chronological advancement being that the class learnt more or less at the pace of the dumbest and the bright kids get bored. OK, this is a black and white picture and I know there are shades of grey, but there is not a perfect solution where one has classes of 25 or more kids, often from very different backgrounds. The only possible solution is to have classes of, say, five with similar abilities, motivation and age range, but this is utopian as the cost of multiplying the number of adequate teachers would be astronomical.

It is really an impossible situation.

[Jessterw]

Doesn't seem all that different from the Dual-Enrollment programs we had in High School when I was living in Florida. My Junior and Senior years were almost all University classes. Of course, these classes were held at the High School and were helmed by teachers who worked at the school and were also Uni professors.

It seemed to work well in that we were challenged and engaged, yet were still allowed the social interaction with our peers/friends.